Kissing Cousins: A Memory (8 page)

“And you two will have to be in attendance the whole day,”

I was proud of that phrase; it gave exactly the tone. They had groaned at the prospect; with the whole river-and-village summer day open to them—why?

“For the honor of the family,” I’d said, knowing that would intrigue them. “And because that is the way I was brought up,” I’d added, grinning—on that subject I knew I was already the family bore.

“Yes, you know about my upbringing,” I’d said, as severely as my always insecure adulthood could manage—because it was always placing itself on the side of the child. “But you’ve never experienced it.”

The Pyles would certainly expect to be asked to dinner as well, before their long trek back, I said, and would take it kindly that the whole family would be there. If we wanted to be extra hospitable—I thought of Nita—we would also offer a light afternoon snack. “For which you two could opt out.”

“Ice cream and cake?” They grinned back. Maybe they’d stay.

But why did I want it so much, one of them said, and the other answered: “To show us off.”

That was true, and I duly blushed for it—now that I had children, blushes came easier. But since becoming a storyteller myself, I had learned that truth always intrigues. And although I had never fished since that once in Port, was maybe the best bait.

“Yes, I do enjoy that, more than you like. I promise to keep it down. But there’s another reason I want you to be around.”

Their pre-teen faces had been still apple-cheeked but already lengthening with pre-knowledge; could I burden those? “Because when we older ones”—should I say “go,” or “die”? As a child I hated the euphemisms dealt me—only learning much later that drawing room comedy could be made of them. But that style of comedy is not deep enough for children.

“Because when we elders die, you will be our keepers,” I said.

And all that livelong day the Pyles and we had the single, double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and sextuple satisfactions that can crisscross a family, even if composed only of six dubiously related people and one like-minded, family-clogged father and spouse. I saw how the Pyles recognized even burgeoning memory-manners when they saw them, how touchingly they stretched their stories to provision this—and how thirstily they had needed this for themselves. I saw my children sink deep and gratefully into the genealogical texture. Alone in the kitchen, which, after giving them a look-see at my own husbandry I had forbidden the Pyles, I could hear only a satisfying family hum.

It can be pleasant to cook to the tune of that, and to provender it with old linen and spoons, maybe recognizable, too. At one moment, when the past became too poignant to be borne in company, I went into the bathroom and cried.

After the Pyles had gone, we all agreed that such a day was worth it, but almost too much.

The second time the Pyles had come to Grandview, that next summer, they hadn’t telephoned, arriving unexpectedly on a midday that was to become notable in village lore—the day a zebra had blundered into a garden on the left bank of the Hudson, our garden. Later I had incorporated that incident into a story, “Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra,” that dealt with quite different people, among them a half-French heroine, Arietta Fay. But one sentence, after a description of the catching of the beast by the cops and the Hudson River Cowboy Association, had detailed as follows:

At the height of it—children screaming, yokels gaping, three heated men hanging on ropes, the whole garden spiraling like a circus descended from the sky, and in the center of it all, the … striped, the incredible … Arietta’s eighty-five-year-old Cousin Beck from Port Washington, a once-a-year and always unheralded visitor, had steamed up the driveway in her ancient Lincoln, into the center of it all. “Oh, Cousine Beck,” she’d stammered in French, she never knew why—“you find us a little
en déshabille,
we have us
un zebre.
” And how Beck, taking one look, had eased her old limbs out of the car and grunted “Arietta, you
are
dependable. Just bring me a chair.”

I had taken liberties. They were “unheralded” only that second time, which we couldn’t know would be the last. And I wasn’t Arietta. What I actually had said was: “Oh, Aunt Beck, you find us a little upset. We have a zebra in the garden.” Beck may not have been quite eighty-five. The elders looked older in those days, often making almost a profession of it. But what she said in life and in the story were the same. She did not change.

“Yes, she did, didn’t she. Love visiting,” I said now. “Remember the day you all came to Grandview?” I am remembering that first time. How my daughter, long since dead, had said guiltily that she didn’t like Nita. But liked the other two, in fact “loved” Aunt Beck—and why didn’t we have more visiting days? How my son of eight, now a bearded man with his own daughters, had asked—where were the Pyle men?

What Katie remembers, chuckling, is the zebra day. “You got Mahma down to the life. And how she loved reading that story.”

So, Beck had still been alive when I wrote it. Older people tend to disappear during one’s absence. If the interval has been long, one accepts that, chary about asking the details, and guilty, too. It struck me that there was a lot I hadn’t asked, about Beck. But age had its privileges—some grudgingly acceded to.

“Katie—was Beck’s death sudden? I never knew.”

“Naw, you didden.” That tone, admonishing me from a central standard where manners were ethic, too—I have had it from her only once before:
What the devil did you think I went out to shoot
? Almost at once, though, her face quirks in its ever-jesting need to wish to be fair, to underscore the teasing we all get from life. “But by rights if you’d asked at the time I wouldn’t have told you, hon’.” A face that has quirked too much—when it is agonized, it can I look like a frog’s. “She just wore out. One day—she just wore out. And I was away on a case.”

She reached for one of the hot compresses at her side, pressed her face in and then slung the towel around her neck. “When you live with it you don’t see it. But I should have. I’m a nurse.”

I am not a nurse. But I am seeing it. In this sorry little room I am learning more than I want to know about the gossip of the old. When they pry the air thisaway, thataway like turkey gobblers following their beaks, they are weighing the long gossip to come—of themselves. I am feeling what it means when a person is beginning to disappear, carrying her history slung around her neck, and bearing that great box, the household that no one after her will so rightly know. Katie wants to hand hers over to me, in such proportion as she sees. But I have to help. I have to suck from her throat what she cannot expel herself.

“Katie. Was it your choice to come down here?”

For a swollen moment we are neither of us seeing these crackerbox walls that no china closet can turn into a real house loaded with time. Nor the roadways out there, chatty with advices on death. Nor those mountains of handicraft which, if carefully swapped with a neighbor, will keep both of you anchored to the sliding Florida earth. A nurse knows better, at least most of the time. And I have had a household from which the habitués have slid one by one.

“No. C’ose not. Sista chose it.”

I have the distinct sensation that I have lanced a boil. Though I have had no medical training of any kind.

But now she is pleading with me. “Hon’—Rachel never had much.”

So that’s why I disliked her. As the rich dislike the poor.

“You were the elder, weren’t you, Katie?”

“Nita was, by three years. But after a while, people didn’t think so.”

She says this equably, as an observed fact. I want to scoop up and tally the resentment she should have had.

“Because she was—so dependent on you. Didn’t she have a typing agency once?”

“She went into debt over it. Mahma kept paying for it and didn’t tell me. I’d just been made supervisor and couldn’t get home much. My own head supervisor was a battle-axe.” She made the kind of impish face that kids make behind the gym teacher’s back. “Taught me how to be … And then I did get home, and found out. Mahma didn’t have any more money. She’d been giving Ayron, too—he was just starting out. And she’d simply come to the end of what they had … But all that was later, hon’.”

“I remember! There was talk about it in the family. That was when you took on special cases—Sundays and holidays. And everybody except Daddy said you were too ambitious.”

She chuckled. “So I was. To them.”

“And that you would ruin your health.”

“I ’most did. But then, you know, I’d been in the awmy, where health wasn’t exactly”—she gave me a look, tender but critical. “Your family—I have to say it, dollin’. The whole lot of them on your father’s side. Beck and I often said it. They were the healthiest hypochondriacs we ever saw.”

And suddenly we begin to laugh and laugh. I can hear our joint cackle almost separate from my half of it. Oh, what a release—and yes, a joining—for aren’t I creeping up now, almost Katie’s contemporary?

“It was just that they were always so
interested,
” I gasped. “In what life could
do
to them.”

As the laughter ebbs, she, too, leans back, released, and I think to myself, we could founder here; we could stay on memory’s cute side, on the pawky side of the folklore, the kind that people love to buy—and why not? After all, hon’—you didn’t die of that diphtheria.

But hadn’t I been taught—only realizing now that my fond, fussy hypochondriacs had been the ones to teach me—that my early rescue gave me an extra obligation to life, to report on life?

We had forgotten the other chair. That’s what a chair can do—look immanent. What a family of chairs we had been, each demanding that its history be kept up!

“‘Later,’ you said, Katie. Later than what?”

“Oh—for Sista, I meant.”

It comes slowly—why?

“She was a right pretty little thing, to start. Chubby always, but also—you know—fat oriented.” There was a professional tinge to Katie’s words now; after a period of mourning, those facts become memory, too. “How I tried to keep after her about the fat, but you knew Sista. Even those last months when the fat was around the heart like a—I saw the report, I made them show me it—but Rachel would say, ‘I just cain’t eat without butter to my bread.’”

I could hear the plaint, the intonation.

“I tried to restrain her—but it was all she had.”

What about—men? I find I can’t say it. We reserve a certain priggishness for our elders, for their own silly sake—even with a woman who can label her own skeleton. Or because where there is a Sista, there is the other sister—whose history is also lurking here?

“Rachel bore the brunt of our move North, you know. She was just that much older. Three years make a difference when you’re a child. She stayed close to home. And Mahma made Port as much like down home as she could.”

“So that was its charm for me. I never yet figured that.”

Katie smiled almost condescendingly—as one does to a child.

“But she was attractive then? That should have helped.

Weren’t there ever any—?”

“Men?” Katie said comfortably, shifting the compress on her neck.

Why that gesture, so straightforward, should compel me to see her in another spectrum—I know full well. My generation had been schooled to measure what we do with the body as at once explanation of what we were or were not, and panacea for it. By era, Katie belonged to those women before me who mostly had not even exercised, much less carried their bodies in open and conscious demand. Now I was not so sure she belonged with them.

“That was when she wanted us to call her Nita.” Katie stops short with that conciliatory shrug one gives when one is about to abuse someone else’s confidence. “There was a young man—Hot-tense.” Her voice drops into that soft rhythm in which we in the family told special stories, often about ourselves. “He was paying her attention. More than just a beau. Likely it would have come to a point. Then something happened. Mahma knew what it was and said it was nothing serious. Mahma had town connections; she said she had investigated—and Mahma never lied. She couldn’t; that was her trouble. But Ayron took against the young man. And nobody could control my brother when he had a mind to be the man of the family.”

Surely she had mourned him that summer she visited us—or mourned death—but the words are dry.

“The young man wanted to see Nita again, but Brother wouldn’t have it. I was away then, too, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because Mahma knuckled under. She crah’d when she told me of it. She had to let Brother be a man, she said. And Ayron had forbidden the other young man the house.”

I could see Beck going the rounds of the town, maybe even to those not too well known to her, but doing what was done down home, where one’s connections made gossip the best mediator. Staunchly setting out in the dress that could go anywhere. Waiting for Katie to come home, so she could cry. Waiting for Aaron to bring home the fish for dinner.

Then, quite without thinking on it, I made my connections—as any child of our long, female afternoons would—and clapped my hand to my mouth.

“What, hon’?” Katie has the rueful smile one wears when one has “told.” “Something bit you?”

That, too, was what we had said among us, to sudden revelation.

“Nothing. Oh—Aaron and I went fishing once. At the club. And I disgraced myself. He ever say?” No need to mention it at home, he’d said.

“Hon’. You pee in your pants?”

“Good God, no. I was ten years old. I ruined a visiting girl’s dress.”

When I told her how come, she laughed again, of course, not noticing that this time I held back.

“They were a rich-looking young couple,” I say, describing the dress. I didn’t describe what the girl’s companion wore, though I still remembered him perfectly—white flannel legs, blue blazer sharp-edged in the sun, brass buttons with anchors on them.

“Were those medals?” I’d asked Aaron as we walked home our catch. “No,” he’d said, exploding again. “Far too many of them.” Aaron himself had been wearing whatever fishermen wore, neat but unmemorable. Or what they had worn in Richmond maybe. When serious again his face was more rigid than Katie’s, but his eyes had her blue. Walking along, jogging the pail, he’d dug me in the ribs again with his other hand, maybe too sharply. “Keep it dark about those two—remember? You and I just caught ourselves some fish.” He saw my expression. “You caught them,” he said.