Good Family (22 page)

Slowly, firmly, he pushes back the coats. Like Houdini, he snakes into a space barely big enough for a child. The closet is pitch-black; I cannot see his eyes. But I feel him. I feel his breath, his chest, his leg against my thigh. When he puts his fingers to my lips, it is all I can do not to moan.

The phone outside the closet door rings and rings and rings. I hear cousins calling in the distance, but they sound impossibly far away. I want them to call
all-ye all-ye oxen free
, but they don’t. It is quiet except for Derek’s breathing and the deafening pulse of my heart. In such proximity to Derek, all the feelings, memories, expectations, and disappointments I have managed to avoid are jamming into the closet like lost relatives. The ghosts of my father’s terse words; the impotent echo of my mother’s responses. The ghost of Aunt Pat by the hose bib as she peeled off our bathing suits to wash us down, sending us naked upstairs to dress. I press myself against the wall, recoiling from recollections of Derek’s drawings of a self-consciously nude fourteen-year-old; memories of Edward saying,
No one really sees you
. I am prodded in my sternum by Jamie’s wounded, angry eyes; Sadie’s soft head nudges my chest; my throat is gripped by the hot relief of vodka. Dread is upon me in this closet. Five middle-aged cousins still acting like children—we have played this game for years.

In a low whisper, Derek says, “They can’t find us. It’s too obvious.”

To which I can say nothing. This is the Aerie, after all.
Sanctus sanctorum por pueris eternis
. We’ll never really grow up.

There are voices in the dining room. Someone is saying,
Did you check the closet? I checked it
, someone says, but Sedgie says,
Check it again
.

The door swings open. A tiny bit of light streams in, and I can make out Derek’s eyes. You can fall into those eyes. They are links to a new dimension. Boots are being pulled away. Tennis rackets. Hangers are stripped of foul-weather gear. Everything is rearranged until Derek and I stand exposed.

“Right under our noses,” Sedgie says. “Christ.”

I
head to the kitchen for a glass of water. My hand is shaking, and my chest feels damp. The dining room looks like a rummage sale with everything pulled from the closet.

You’ve got to be kidding
, Angus had said.
Your cousin?

Maddie
, said Dr. Anke,
where was your mother?

I put my glass in the drainer, lean against the sink. Dusk is falling, and there’s still no electricity. Soon we’ll be lighting candles and setting out leftovers.

I shake my head to clear it. The tunnel recedes; my heart slows. Everyone seems to have gathered back in the living room. Slowly, I climb the stairs. I move through the Lantern Room, through the two adjoining bathrooms, coming out into a hallway just off the nursery that I prefer to avoid.

It’s just a room
, Dr. Anke told me.
Go in, breathe the air, touch the crib. Cry if you like. But go in
.

I push through the door and am assaulted by the scent of lavender. It sends me cartwheeling back to those nights with Louisa in my bed, shadows on the wall. Being in close quarters with Derek has disoriented me. Now I can hear breathing—my own, at first, then the breaths of someone else—in and out—as faint and indiscernible as that of a sleeping child. Hypnotized, I listen, wondering if there are ghosts. But there is nothing unworldly about this breathing. It comes from the bed. I rise, stride over, and
pull back the sheets, see my fully clothed niece entwined with Beowulf. They could be two small children holding each other, afraid of the storm. They could be twins like Derek and Edward reaching for each other in their mother’s womb. There is nothing menacing or untoward in the way they are pressed together, but in a flash, I snap. I hear myself saying in a voice not my own, “Oh, my God, what are you doing? Get
away
from her! What are you…get
away
!”

“What is the big deal?” Jessica’s eyes are practically popping as she sits up.

My voice. Again. Even shriller. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

“What the—!” Sedgie has run into the room, followed by Dana and Philip.

“Maddie, we heard you—?”

“Don’t you touch her. Don’t you
touch
her!”

“It’s because of Sadie,” says Dana crisply. “Get Maddie out of this room.” She wheels around to Philip. “
Now!
”

Philip grabs my arm, but I shake him off. I am shouting. “She wants to get pregnant! He’s her
cousin
, for God sakes.”

“Easy,” says Beowulf.

“Maddie!” Dana’s voice is sharp, authoritative, and as effective as a slap to the face.

I stop midstammer, my eyes meeting Jessica’s. “You…I’m…”

“Sorry?”
says Jessica sarcastically. If Dana’s voice stopped me in my tracks, Jessica’s makes me flinch. She shakes her head in disgust and, pushing past me, says, “You think you know everything, MaddieAunt. You really do.”

N
o one spoke much at dinner. Sedgie tried Hamlet’s soliloquy, but no one seemed to care. The conversation was whispered and subdued, suitable to candlelight. We couldn’t see one another’s faces. It was better that way.

Now I am lying in my bed, listening to the dripping of gutters. By midnight, the electricity has come back on. The rain stopped hours ago, but like
a wound that won’t heal, water hemorrhages from the eaves. Even now, I am haunted by the smell of ghosts and lovers and babies who die. There is madness in the scent of it. It’s how I know we’re not alone.

Adele says there are souls that linger in between. Neither here nor there, they are dust balls clinging to the lacy casements of our minds. Dr. Anke calls them introjections. People in AA call them the wreckage of our past. Whatever they are, they have me by the throat.

The dripping becomes the incessant beating of a pulse. My lids are pricked with light. Is this the beginning of the relentless sleeplessness that Dana has described? Unconsciousness eludes me. In a slumbering house, I lie awake.

I pull off the covers and rise, leave my room, and go into the hall. Most of the doors to the bedrooms are closed. Downstairs, Derek sleeps in the Love Nest, his wife of twenty-two years halfway around the world bivouacking above Tanzania. I can hear Mother snoring, wonder if it echoes in Miriam’s room via the monitor. I glide down the stairs, avoiding the creaky one. The table has been cleared, the closet put back; the kitchen is spotless thanks to the teamwork of cousins. There is cereal in the upper cabinet, jam in the refrigerator, scotch and vodka under the sink in the pantry. That’s where I’m headed, pulled into the gravity of a black hole, the event horizon rushing at me.

Where is God to help me now? Or for that matter, Betty?
Half measures will avail us nothing
, the AA Big Book tells us.
We stood at the turning point
.

I reach for the vodka, unscrew the cap.

Alcohol is a molecule that binds quickly to the blood. The digestive tract recognizes it as a sugar and, with a burst of insulin, rushes to incorporate it. The taste buds rebel while the prefrontal cortex, the corpus luteum, the hippocampus, and, finally, the reptilian brain all say,
Yes!
And if you are alcoholic—not a “problem drinker” or an occasional drunk—but if you’re the bona fide real thing, you don’t break alcohol down like everyone else. It sticks in your system; you reek of acetaldehyde; the residue, as it hits your nervous system, is like morphine in its potency.

And for a period of time, you feel absolutely normal.

I know what it is like to approach the turning point. I feel like it at this moment. The past rushed by me in that closet, the Doppler-warped sound crashing as it sped into the future. I want to call 911. I want to cry out for help. In a minute, my hemoglobin will be bejeweled with intoxicants, and the receptors in my brain will be screaming for more.

Slamming the bottle back under the sink, I stride into the dining room, pick up the phone, and call Ian.

A
s you first stir awake, you struggle between what was dream, what was reality. Dream, you pray. Please let it have been a dream. The sky is lightening to the east, and you think, Did you drink or not?

Ian says he’s not afraid of taking the first drink; it’s all the subsequent drinks he’ll have to take once he begins that keep him from starting. As soon as the residual trauma of flirting with disaster wears off, I’m sure I’ll feel idiotic. Now all I feel is a dull wonder that the sky is lightening, and that Ian has agreed to come. In New York, I have friends who know me by my work, not by my family ties. I think, Why don’t you die so I can go back to my life, but I’m not sure whom I’m addressing. My mother? My memories? My self?

Facing one’s demons is overrated. I make a note to mention this to Dr. Anke.

A
fresh morning breeze crosses Mother’s room and catches me in the doorway. In the half-light, I can make out the form of a mahogany bureau, a Boston rocker, a pair of slippers, and a robe. Light falls on
her pillow, and I see she has slipped down and rolled onto her side, her head bent as if she’s ducking from a blow. I cross to her bed. On the nightstand sits one of those divided pillboxes that have compartments for days and weeks of medication—medication to thin the blood, medication to sleep, medication for the bowels, medication to keep the skin and teeth from decaying. Now that we have taken her off everything except morphine, the compartments are empty. There is a glass with a straw, and I sniff the liquid, but it is only water.

“Mother?” I say.

She draws a long, ratchety breath, and I decide to pull her up on the pillows. I come around to the other side, bend down, and, as if I am lifting a child, hook under her armpits and heave. She moves so quickly, and her head jerks, that I am startled and unnerved. “I’m so sorry!” I say quickly. “Did I hurt you?” Her right eye drifts open. Again, that rattle of a sigh.

“Ian’s coming,” I say once I’m assured she’s all right. “I showed him a picture of you with your garden club.” I speak briskly, now, knowing my mother has no choice but to listen. “He said you looked like you would never smell.”

I tell her if it weren’t for Ian, I would never have stayed in filmmaking. We’ve made three documentaries and a short. Our criterion is that it be about anybody and anything unorthodox. And that we get the funding. In the meantime, Ian still works as a freelance editor to make ends meet, and I’ve nearly run through my inheritance.

I sit on the side of her bed. Rented from the hospital-supply company, it is rigid and, unlike the rest of the beds in the house, gives little. Ian started drinking when he was eleven. His family in Minnesota treated him like a freak because he loved art and beauty and music and women’s clothes.

“He got me into AA,” I say.

My mother told me never to mention those meetings again, but what’s the harm at this point? I’m sure it’s my imagination, but it feels as though she is hanging on my words. She once asked me with great embarrassment how homosexual men managed sex. I remember hesitating, then dissembling,
uncertain if
fellatio
and
anal intercourse
were in my mother’s lexicon. Now I tell her how Ian practically flunked out of high school, how he sniffed glue and chomped on Percodan and drank beer for breakfast. When he was eighteen, he was beat up and raped, but he doesn’t even remember or, for that matter, hold it against anyone. He spent a month in a hospital. When he got out, he left for New York, where he shot up drugs while working as a film grip. By the time he landed at NYU, he’d been sober for three years and was determined to overcome the Lutheranism of his childhood by converting to Judaism—a plan he later aborted, pleading fear of circumcision.

“He’s a brilliant filmmaker, Mom. He says if it weren’t for Lee Remick talking about that oil slick in
The Days of Wine and Roses
, he wouldn’t have gotten sober. You know that part, don’t you? The part when Lee says that, when she drank, she saw a beautiful rainbow instead of an oil slick?”

I look at my mother’s symmetrically perfect profile. I think she knows exactly what I mean about oil slicks and rainbows and the elusive quest for joy. She was a shy girl who grew up thinking the river was going to swallow her. She drank because she was terrified. She drank because she was bored. She drank because she was married to a man whose inviolable virtue put him out of reach. She drank because it’s what they did, these postwar wives with their postwar babies and their postwar husbands who had reclaimed the world. She had a diamond circle pin and a pearl necklace and a big beautiful house with a cook. She told Dana and me that we should aspire to the same. What did that treachery cost you, Mother? The words should have stuck in your throat.

“Ian’s compulsive about germs, and he’s convinced he’s HIV-positive, even though the test keeps coming back negative,” I tell my mother. “Dr. Anke calls it survivor’s guilt.”

I look out the window at the silver dawn lake. Survivor’s guilt is something my therapist and I discuss frequently. We rank it right up there with shame. My mother once threw up in a revolving door after a wedding reception at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Whenever she recounted that story, she made it sound hilarious, but I don’t think I can make almost drinking
vodka straight from the bottle after years of sobriety seem even remotely funny.

I notice someone standing at the door. Dana, still in her flannel nightgown, is peering in.

“I’m talking to Mother,” I say preemptively. “I’m telling her about my life.”

Dana raises her eyebrow. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Do you think it will kill her?” I say irritably. “My poisonous life?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“What, then?”

Dana considers, then shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’m saying, Maddie.”

Dana looks so suddenly vulnerable, so completely overwhelmed that I want to go to her and take her in my arms and rock her and sing,
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
. But the argument from the night before still stings. All I can come up with is a pathetic, “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry about what I said about Jessica and Beowulf. I’m sorry I disappeared.

“Ian’s coming,” I tell her. “I called him last night, and he’s catching a flight this afternoon.”

“Ian?”

“My partner. You know, the filmmaker?” The impatience in my voice is full-blown now.

Dana says quickly, “I know who Ian is.” A pause. “But why?”

“Why is he coming?” I look out the window. There are whitecaps on the bay, and the sun is shining furiously. Soon, Miriam will arrive upstairs to prepare Mother, to administer her morphine and try to get her to eat, attending a decaying shrine long after the gods have left.

“I nearly drank last night.”

Crestfallen doesn’t begin to describe the look on Dana’s face. Alarm, betrayal, possibly disappointment. I can’t even say
I’m sorry
again. I can’t even tell her why. I want to protest,
It’s the disease
, but Dana doesn’t see alcoholism as a disease, rather more as a failure of will. Even with all I have
learned about addiction, I tend to agree with her. It’s as if my character is flawed, as if my father’s suspicions about my lack of virtue were confirmed. Had I done a better job of polishing the winches, coiling the lines, suppressing the feelings of envy and longing when I looked at the newer boats, I wouldn’t be cursed with such spinelessness.

You realize there’s a genetic tendency?
Dr. Anke once asked me.

To which I responded that it was consistently demonstrated to me that drinking was a viable coping mechanism.

So you blame your parents?

Yes. No. Doesn’t everyone?

“Was it because of Jessica?” Dana says.

The summer I was fourteen, my cousin came to my room. I thought about telling my mother, but she was too concerned about Dana, so cavalierly treated by that tennis-player boyfriend. If I try to explain to my sister how my life changed that August out of disillusionment and embarrassment combined with a saucy, rebellious pride, she will be utterly baffled.

“No,” I say. “It wasn’t because of Jessica.”

I
’ve stood in this airport a thousand times, waiting for planes. When we stopped taking trains, we started flying on a twin-engine prop that was guided in by a man waving flashlights on the ground—the same man who then hauled our baggage off the plane and carried it inside. Molded-plastic chairs have replaced the splintery wood benches; video games the pinball that earlier replaced the Foozball. There is a hamburger joint but no shop in the airport, no place to buy a magazine—only local real-estate brochures and road maps and tourist brochures advertising the Mackinaw ferry and the A-maaaazing Mystery Spot.

Ian has to catch the 6
A.M.
flight out of JFK to make his connection to northern Michigan. When he gets to Detroit, he will have to wait for hours. He will scan the flight-departure monitors, looking for the name of an obscure and sparsely populated town and be directed to a gate in the
G concourse, miles from where he disembarked from his New York flight. He will walk endlessly to get to the gate and, when he gets there, find it as desolate as a bus station. The only other flights leaving from that part of the airport are heading to Escanaba, Manistee, or Sault Ste. Marie. There will be no Starbucks, no newsstands. Only a vending machine with the Snickers sold out. His flight will be delayed. Unable to find a latte or a
New York Times
, Ian will try meditating because AA encourages it. He’s terrible at meditating; worse at praying. Nevertheless, when there’s nothing else to distract him, Ian surrenders and tries.

When they finally announce his flight, he will walk outside and find a tram that will take him to a prop plane at a distant locale on the tarmac. At this point, his resolve will be tested—not because he is unfamiliar with this kind of banishment, but because it will feel like a regression to the wastelands of his youth. Only the promise of the Shangrai-la of Sand Isle at the other end (that and the duty-bound need to rescue his friend) will prod him on.

When his plane comes to a stop, I feel that leap of excitement I’ve always felt when people arrived. It is like meeting the stagecoach after it has crossed the Sierra, or Lindbergh’s plane after his transatlantic flight. Slowly, the propellers wind to a stop. Everyone looks tired as they step off the plane; they blink blearily at the sky. Then they inhale the sweet Michigan air, and all is forgiven.

Ian is the fourth person off, after a businessman and an elderly couple. I wave at him frantically through the sliding-glass doors. I can tell he sees only his reflection in the windows because he’s squinting desperately as if he’s not quite sure he’s landed on the right planet.

“You’re here!” I say as he pushes through the doors.

“And where is ‘here’ exactly?” says Ian, peering around. The gritty terrazzo floors and general seediness of the airport bode poorly in his assessment, but I tell him it gets better, that this is just an outpost, a place for landing planes.

“I brought a
huge
suitcase,” he says. “I packed everything. Three pairs of khakis, every cashmere sweater and Lacoste shirt I own.”

He’s taken his earring out, I notice. I also notice he is sockless, and that he is wearing loafers with buckles.

“You’re looking a little straight, Ian.”

“Actually, it’s
you
who looks a little…God, Maddie, you look awful.” He bends down. Ian is quite tall—well over six feet—and his eyes are the palest, saddest gray I’ve seen in a human being. But now he’s studying me, searching my face for answers. There are no answers, I want to tell him. Just the stupid fact of my nearly unraveling after eight whole years.

“MaddieAddieAddie.”

“Let’s go,” I say.

L
ord, what a trip,” Ian says as we pull out of the airport parking. He jerks his head at the fleet of private jets on the other side of the chain-link fence. “How do we get one of those?”

We turn onto the highway. I refrain from mentioning that one of “those” belongs to my former boyfriend Jamie. Irritated with Ian for even bringing it up, I say, “Everything’s changing.”

“This is
definitely
not the Midwest of the plains,” says Ian as we speed down country roads.

I wait for Ian to start in with his “you’re only as sick as your secrets” lecture about doing the twelve steps (even if he
does
call God Betty)—although, right now, he is busily behaving half like a tourist, half like a filmmaker, pointing out wildflowers and picturesque barns.

“Ian,” I say, “what’s with the Gucci loafers?”

“An attempt, Maddie dear—albeit a pathetic one—to fit in.”

Ian has this picture of my family as shabby gentry, but no one (other than my ex-husband) is running around with ascots and smoking jackets. Our family’s fashion flair expired with my mother’s generation—unless you count Adele, whose own sense of style has evolved into a combination of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Elvira.

“You’re very cute, Ian. Even when you’re jet-lagged.”

“You’re not still on the ‘I’m thinking of having a baby’ kick, are you?”

“If
you
were straight…”

“Lord help me. With your hideous taste in men?”

“Not all of them.”

“Angus Farley?”

“Who doesn’t count. I was drunk.”

“That’s a lame excuse.”

“And since when have
you
been so picky about men?”

Ian doesn’t answer. He is taking in the scenery. I can almost see it through his eyes: expanses of green velvet edged by dense woods or pocked by thistle and Queen Anne’s lace, the occasional stupefied cow. We roll and wind; forest becomes marsh, clotted with cattails and the drowned carcasses of trees. Only a few white clouds smudge the sky. If Ian finds it beautiful, he isn’t letting on. He may find it reminiscent of the plains, but surely this is lusher, greener, less susceptible to the expansive flatness of his youth. “God,” he says with plaintive resignation bordering on disgust. “Bovines.”