Good Family (2 page)

I
have always woken early on Sand Isle. There is a bird that calls out just before light, and then the yardman begins to sweep down the cobwebs. The melancholy church bells toll across the channel as the island comes to life: the competing trills of doves, a distant motor droning, the rustle of sheets. There is a tipping point when it all comes together, when I could still drift back into oblivion or rise instead, becoming a daughter, a sister, a mother.

Lying very still, I allow my body to sink into the mattress. Sometimes I imagine someone coming into my room to check on me—the reincarnation of Louisa, perhaps, as my mother’s nurse. She will feel my forehead, take my pulse. Perhaps she will inject me with something. I know it is an addict’s fantasy, but in this house, it comes to me vividly and unbidden. The last time I was here, I was beyond redemption.

Now—oppressed by the weight of blankets—I throw them off, pull a sweatshirt on over my nightgown, and head down the hall. My mother’s room, once that of my grandmother, looks out upon Lake Michigan. On bright, sunny afternoons, the color of lake seeps through the windows and turns the room a dreamy blue.

“Mother?”

She cannot turn her head. Ever since the stroke, she’s been immobilized. The nurse has propped her on a pillow, put one of those half doughnuts around her neck that keep people’s heads from dropping sideways on airplanes. With her neck brace, her hair combed back from an ashen, once-lovely face, she looks almost Elizabethan.

During my early childhood when my grandmother was alive, this room smelled of Addison’s Sweet Rose Hand Cream and Joy perfume. Now cigarette smoke clings to the window sheers along with newer emanations related to bedsores and incontinence. Even so, it is still the most beautiful of rooms. The southeast corner above the card room opens into a round sitting room of a tower looking out on an oak tree my father climbed as a boy, scaring my grandmother half to death. A screen door leads to a sleeping porch overlooking the lake. The mahogany bed has been replaced by something leased from the hospital. There is a folded wheelchair leaning into a corner, but according to my sister, it hasn’t been used since they arrived in July.

She won’t go out, Dana told me. She’s pulling into herself.

I study my mother’s face. I am fascinated by this pulling inward, one eye open, perhaps seeing, perhaps not. Her left side is drooping, but when I saw her in California right after her stroke, her right side still had that way of crinkling at the nose. Now everything seems sunken and waxy—even her beautiful throat. If I have barely touched her in years, I am even less inclined this morning.

“So,” says a voice behind me, “you came.”

I turn. “Hello, Miriam.”

Miriam is wrapped in a pink chenille robe. She hasn’t yet put on her wig, and her black hair is oiled and pulled rigidly into a net. She hasn’t penciled in her eyebrows, either, and I realize she’s no spring chicken. At the very least, she’s over sixty, less than ten years younger than my mother, yet she’s the one who bathes and dresses her, dabs her mouth as gently as a lover. Miriam’s arms are crossed, and she gives me a long, steady look as if she’s
wondering why I’m here after all this time, and I realize there is no Louisa in Miriam. I stare back, refusing to back down from the gaze of an old, black home-care nurse, even if she
is
the one who wipes my mother’s bottom.

“Wake up, honey,” she says to my mother. “You won’t believe who’s come.”

My mother’s eye wanders briefly to the left. There is no movement in her fingers or her mouth. Only her chest rises and falls.

“I can’t stay long,” I say for my mother’s benefit as much as Miriam’s. “I’m here to help Dana get ready. Besides,” I go on, trying to sound upbeat, “it looks as if she has everything she needs.”

“Oh, she has everything she needs,” says Miriam, pressing her lips together.

I push open the window so I can listen to the waves. In the distance, the drone of a motorboat. I wonder if my mother hears these things, if she hears the cawing of gulls or the sizzle of heat bugs after the rain.

“Miriam,” I say, “do you think she can hear me?”

“She hears you all right.”

I lean against a bureau and look down on her. Her head has dropped to the side in an almost coy fashion is if she is flirting, but I’m convinced she can’t see me. Wouldn’t she say something? Wouldn’t she mouth my name?

“How do you know when to feed her?” I ask Miriam.

Miriam’s eyebrows are drawn together with vicious precision. “I feed her,” she says, matching my intonation exactly, “when she’s hungry.”

Yes, of course, when she’s hungry. But how would Miriam know? I fix my eyes on my mother. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

Miriam sticks a straw into my mother’s mouth. My mother’s cheeks work vigorously as her eyes roll toward me like a curious child’s. I wonder if Miriam has spiked the drink, and if that’s why my mother is sucking so earnestly. “Why don’t you tell her about your life?” Miriam suggests.

I laugh quickly and turn away. My mother stopped asking me about my life ten years ago, so why should I inflict it upon her now? Would she really like to hear about being single and thirty-nine in New York? Or would she
like to hear about the documentaries Ian and I make—obscure narratives about obscure people who have spent their lives pursuing arcane interests? Or how I met Ian in grad school; how he got me into treatment and AA when I was starting, it seemed, from scratch? We had held each other’s hands at the close of my first meeting, both of us averse to touching, each of us refusing to say the Lord’s Prayer, our hands clutching afterward like survivors on a raft, both of us knowing we had found a kindred soul.

“She doesn’t want to hear about my life.”

“How would you know what she likes to hear about?”

“I wouldn’t even know how to ask.”

Miriam dabs at my mother’s lips. “She likes music. You like music, don’t you, Evelyn?” My mother’s eyes are intensely locked on Miriam. She doesn’t nod. Instead she makes a clicking sound, apparently with her tongue.

“What’s she doing?” I ask.

“She’s telling me she’s had enough.”

Oh, dear God.

“You can sing to her,” Miriam says to me. “You know how to sing, don’t you?”

“If you consider a two-note range singing.”

Miriam looks at me as though I’m beyond the pale. Her look reminds me of Louisa, and I think of how, when we were growing up on Sand Isle, the black help and the white help had different nights off. The memory of it embarrasses me now, like that picture of that little girl on the steps of an Arkansas school. I suddenly want to let Miriam know that I’m not of this place—that I’ve moved light-years away from here. I mention that I have a friend who sings scat in Harlem.

Miriam purses her lips. “I don’t think Evelyn would appreciates
cat.
”

“How can you stand it here, Miriam?”

Miriam smoothes my mother’s hair and begins tucking in her bedclothes. “Keep your apologies,” she says.

I cross to the bed and join her, making hospital corners by my mother’s feet, folding them like handkerchiefs. My mother’s right hand grasps the
sheet; her left lies limp. The nails on both hands are clipped down to the tips, pitifully naked and colorless.

“Miriam,” I say, jerking my head toward the window, where there’s a clear view of the lake, “can’t we move her over there?”

Miriam briskly adjusts a pillow, then squirts some lotion into her hand and starts massaging Mother’s arms.

I persist. “It’s so stuffy in here. She might like the breeze.”

Miriam pulls her brows together, but she seems resigned. “You hear that, Evelyn? You’re going for a ride.” She rubs the rest of the lotion into her own arms and gives me a nod. Together, we heave the hospital bed across the room so that the breeze coming through the window can touch my mother’s face. She’s had so little touching in her life. My theory is that she went to the hairdresser every week because someone would run his fingers across her scalp, massage her temples. Breathing from the exertion, I drag my hand across her forehead. Her open eye closes with the touch. At this moment, I wish I could sing to my mother, sing her something low and soulful to ease her way, but I have only a two-note range and can’t find the words.

I
an?” I almost whisper into the phone.

“Oh, my God! The prodigal Maddie! Have they locked you up yet?”

I make a sound like
oy
, something vaguely Jewish just to make me feel like I’m back in New York. “It’s not just my family,” I tell him. “It’s me. It’s like having your childhood smack you across the face and say, ‘See! This is who you are!’”

“Yes, but have the cousins arrived?” The thought of my cousins makes Ian almost rapturous—poor only-child Ian from Minnesota who grew up a voluptuary in the midst of Lutheran pragmatism. No thespian, coke-sniffing cousins for Ian like my cousin Sedgie; no paint-encrusted heartthrobs like Derek; nor any who, like Adele, believe they are the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. “A-
dele
,” says Ian, his voice lascivious, evoking Sedgie’s glamorous sister. “Is she there yet?”

“Ian,” I say, “I’ve got to book an earlier flight. I want to get back to work.”

Ian, my partner in film production, ignores me. “You’ve got to tell me what she’s wearing.”

I sigh. “No one’s here, Ian,” wanting to add, For
which I am grateful.
“It’s quiet, for once.”

Ian starts incanting, “MaddieAddieAddison. It’s only a place.”

But what does Ian really know about Sand Isle? I have tried to paint for him a picture of exclusivity that doesn’t allow for much variation in race or religion. The dour descendants of Anglo-Scottish ancestors purged their souls with bracing morning swims, retired to prim, sober sleep each evening after vespers. Only at the turn of the century were non-Presbyterians allowed. By then, the climate was distinctly less sober, especially during Prohibition when the denizens had their own bootlegger who came by rowboat after dusk. My great-grandmother, famous for having lost her mind and regaining it, ascribed this to pernicious Episcopalian influences, but before she succumbed to cancer in 1935, the Catholics had appeared, about which Grannie Addie was aggrieved. Since then, interfaith marriages (Presbyterians to Episcopalians, Episcopalians to Catholics) became de rigueur, and, for the first time ever, a divorcée was allowed to take title of the cottage she had inherited from her parents.

Sexual orientation
? Ian had inquired after hearing all this.
Do they care if you’re queer?

Now I hear someone coming out of the kitchen. I tell Ian I will call him back. Hanging up, I stare at the wall. Bead-board is a hallmark of these cottages. Some owners have painted theirs in an attempt to “brighten,” some have Sheetrocked over the studs. Our house is mostly intact, the dark wood in front of me a gallery of framed pictures. Some are tens of decades old—nameless and yellowed. There is my grandfather as a boy in bloomers sitting in a rowboat, his long, blond curls falling past his shoulders. There is my grandmother, droopy-bosomed even before she was middle-aged, three children—four, if you count the one who died—two boys and one girl who would each go on to have two children of their own. Postwar babies who
arrived after my uncle and father returned from Europe, toddling on the knees of aunts whose saving graces were their sisters-in-law and the army of maids in my grandmother’s staff. We are the cousins, and there is ample documentation of our ever-expanding family. Nineteen forty-nine—the first one, Adele, followed by the identical twins Edward and Derek, who had to endure the scrutiny of four grandparents and two sets of aunts and uncles.

The rest of us were born in the fifties—almost the sixties, in my case. Ike was president, Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender,” and the low rumblings of sex, drugs, and rock and roll were beyond the curve of the earth.
That
world, consisting of two kinds of people—relatives and friends—was my Eden, pristine and blank, unfettered by truth before knowledge first touched my lips.

Nineteen-sixty is the first family photo where we’re all together. Edward stands off to the side almost in premonition of his absence. The other cousins are crew-cutted or pixied, three of us fair with Scots-Irish blood, three of us dark—the mysterious gypsy genes—our expressions ranging from confident to surly, our beaming, Coke-fed faces betraying nothing of what came later. There is no hint of multiple incarnations in Adele then. Or of Derek’s artistic bent. And the smaller of us—Sedgie, Dana, and me—we are scooped into our mothers’ laps or leaning against our fathers’ legs, our grandmother, now widowed, anchoring the center. It is here at the Aerie that we all come together, our yearly pilgrimage that defines and gives us meaning. No one looking at this picture would see anyone alcoholic or oversexed or neurotic or delusional. Dana, on my father’s lap, looks slightly worried, her eyebrows furrowed even then. And me? I am the youngest, hardly yet formed, a lump on my mother’s knee, as raw and unprotected as a just-hatched chick.

W
hen Dana comes into the dining room, I am looking at the place I marked twelve years ago behind the door. Eighteen inches above the floor, the initials
S.A.F.
Sadie Addison Farley. She was fifteen weeks old. We held her up to the wall as if we were taking a mug shot.
Sadie’s wrinkled face was red with baby acne, and she looked like a cranky old man in need of a bowel movement.

Penciled into the same soft bead-board, initialed and dated, is the mark of Aunt Pat at age five, already tall for her age. Below and above it are those of my father, barely two feet in ’23, shooting all the way up to six feet two inches in ’55. The whole wall looks like a Rosetta stone of growing children. Some of the initials are difficult to read. Some have changed with marriage and divorce. Next to an aunt in 1920 is a great-nephew in 1984. Same height, two generations later.

“Did you check on Mom?”

“Hmm,” I say.

“So what do you think?”