Senior year, Anne began dating a boy named Royce Holiday, a second-year student at Seattle Central Community College, the older brother of her classmate Tracy Holiday, whom she’d known since seventh-grade choir. Royce Holiday was a cadaverously thin, hirsute youth of twenty, who wore a scraggly attempt at a beard and answered to the self-appointed moniker “Gonzo.” So far as Ruth could surmise, Royce Holiday did not own a pair of shoes that were closed at the toe, nor a pair of pants that were not made of denim and riddled with holes. Despite his deficits in the arena of grooming, the boy was thoughtful and opinionated, qualities for which Ruth could hardly fault him.
Abe, however, disliked the boy immediately and comprehensively, a sentiment he shared with Ruth in bed the night of their first meeting, a dinner at the farm during which the boy had neglected to remove his floppy, wide-brimmed leather Minnetonka hat and continuously talked with his mouth full.
“Gonzo? You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “It’s a good name for a chimpanzee, maybe, but not my daughter’s boyfriend.”
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” said Ruth.
“Compared to who, Charles Manson? Did you hear him at dinner tonight? What was all that baloney about repression? His father owns a brokerage! He could be attending an Ivy League college if he had any gumption.”
“He was talking about Bangladesh,” said Ruth. “I think it’s admirable he’s advocating for human rights.”
“Well, maybe he should concentrate on his own struggles—like trying to liberate that unruly mop of his with a hairbrush. Who knows what might be hiding in there?”
“Anne likes him,” said Ruth.
“She also likes mayonnaise on bananas.”
“The kids like him, too,” said Ruth. “Did you see him with the baby? And the way Karen looks at him? And Kyle?”
“That scares me, too,” said Abe. “This Gonzo’s not exactly what I consider a great role model, Ruth.”
“At least he’s not a druggie.”
“Not that we know about. He looks enough like one. What’s he studying, anyway? Certainly not hygiene.”
“Oh, Abe, give the poor kid a break,” Ruth pleaded. “It’s the style.”
“He looks like a hobo,” said Abe. “They all look like hobos.”
“Look what these kids are up against. At least they’re nonviolent, at least they’re trying to make a difference.”
“I’ll tell you what really bothers me about this Gonzo character,” said Abe. “For all that hair and the dirty clothes and whatnot, he’s slick. Just like his old man the broker. He may not look it, but he is. I don’t trust him, Ruthie. Mark my words, he’s gonna hurt Annie one of these days.”
Whatever Abe thought of him, it was true that the younger kids idolized Gonzo, who gifted Kyle his old baseball card collection and Karen her first stack of LPs, a selection that included Bob Dylan, Mercy, the Box Tops, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, all music Abe could not stand with its squalling guitars and self-important messaging. He liked Dylan least of all. Dylan, “the poet,” with his nasal tones and warbling murmurations.
“What’s wrong with Elvis Presley?” Abe asked rhetorically.
“As I recall, you didn’t like him, either,” said Ruth. “Perry Como was more your speed.”
“At least the man could sing,” said Abe. “Not like this Dylan character, who sounds like a jackass in heat.”
Like just about everything else, Ruth and Abe didn’t agree on Royce Holiday. Where Abe saw an incorrigible rebel with no cause, Ruth saw a boy from a good family who was just finding himself. Ruth appreciated that Royce allowed Karen and Kyle to tag along with Anne and him to the Lemon Tree, or Crazy Eric’s in Poulsbo for hamburgers and milkshakes, or the bookstore, or the library, even when Anne protested the matter.
“Aw, c’mon, Annie,” Gonzo would say. “They’re cooped up on that farm all afternoon. They’re kids, let ’em have a little fun. They won’t bug us.”
Whatever virtues Gonzo may have possessed, Abe blamed the influence of Royce Holiday more than Anne for the change that came over Karen sophomore year of high school. As far as Abe was concerned, Gonzo was polluting Anne’s impressionable little sister with his warmed-over hippie posturing, his lazy opinions, and his half-baked ideologies. In wayfaring around the greater Puget Sound region in rags and that goofy hat, decrying the evils of the establishment, rejecting the customs and institutions that were the glue of this great nation, refusing to honor the timeworn social contracts that had made America the greatest country on Earth, Gonzo, it seemed to Abe, was inviting his daughter, both of his daughters, to drop out, to disengage from the promise of a prosperous future.
Karen’s grades dipped, though not quite precipitously enough to draw disciplinary action from Abe, at least not at first. Even Ruth could see a slipping of standards with Karen, not only academically but socially, where she was no longer engaged with friends as frequently as she’d once been. Moreover, she’d become less communicative with Ruth in recent months, certainly not a unique phenomenon among teenagers but still a troubling development because it seemed out of character for Karen. Though hormones could account for some of it, Ruth worried it was more complex than that. Increasingly, her attempts at familiarity with Karen were greeted with monosyllabic responses or evasion. To tease intimacy out of Karen, once so forthcoming, became an exercise in finesse.
“Sweetie, why don’t you ever go to Deb Carnes’s house anymore?” Ruth inquired innocently, setting Karen’s breakfast in front of her. “You haven’t called Heather Bohannon in weeks. Did you three have some kind of falling-out?”
“No,” said Karen. “Everyone’s just busy with stuff.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” observed Ruth. “You kids ought to leave some time for fun in your life.”
The irony of the statement was not lost on Ruth, who’d spent the entirety of middle and high school with her face in a book, having never felt a need to surround herself with friends. But Karen had always been a social animal, and this sudden turnabout in her daughter’s social life added to Ruth’s anxiety that all was not well with Karen. When Ruth broached the subject with Abe, it was clear he didn’t share her concern.
“She’s fourteen, what do you expect?”
“Maybe she should talk to somebody,” said Ruth.
“You want me to talk to her?” said Abe.
“That’s not what I had in mind.”
“She’s fine, Ruthie, she’s a teenager,” he said. “But whatever you think is right.”
As the weeks wore on, Karen continued to withdraw further into herself, and Ruth attempted to pursue the matter, most often at the breakfast table before the bus, the only interval her children seemed to have the time of day for her anymore.
“I heard from Bev Eckert there’s a dance tomorrow night. Have you picked out what you’re gonna wear?”
“I’m not going,” she said.
“Not going? Sweetie, it’s not like you to miss a dance. Is something wrong?”
“No,” said Karen. “Quit asking me that. Who wants to go to some stupid dance? All they play is terrible music. And all the kids just stand around looking stupid.”
“Did nobody ask you?” said Ruth. “Is that it?”
“Who cares if anybody asked me? Either way, it’s dumb.”
“What about Heather and Deb, are they going?”
“How should I know?” said Karen. “They don’t even talk to me.”
“What happened? Did you have some sort of rift?”
“Yeah, me,” said Karen. “I’m the rift.”
“What does that mean?” said Ruth.
“It means they think I’m weird,” said Karen. “Everybody thinks I’m weird.”
“Weird how?”
“How should I know? Just weird. The things I say, the way I act.”
Oh, how Ruth remembered that feeling of not fitting in, of feeling like an outsider, of being considered weird. And how much more complex was the world now than it was when Ruth was a girl?
“Oh, they’re just jealous,” said Ruth.
“Of what?” said Karen.
“Your maturity,” ventured Ruth.
“Yeah, right, Mom.”
Determined to get to the bottom of the issue, Ruth made the fatal error of taking matters into her own hands, calling Heather Bohannon’s mom, Grace, in an attempt to glean any insight she might have to offer. This conversation soon got back to Heather, Karen, and everybody else at Bainbridge High School.
“Thanks a lot, Mom!” she shouted, arriving home from school the following afternoon. “That really helped! God, what were you thinking?”
“Honey, I was just trying to—”
“Stay out of my life! God, I just wanna get out of here!” she said, storming off to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her.
How had they arrived here? Once their most reliable and least troublesome child, Karen, like Anne before her, began sequestering herself in her room with greater frequency, listening to the records that so offended Abe’s sensibilities. In addition, her interest in extracurricular activities had reached an all-time low; no more math club or drama, and especially no school dances. As she had with Anne, Ruth partially attributed these changes to hormones, although if she was being honest with herself, she secretly suspected that outside cultural forces, those forces that Bainbridge Island, for better or worse, had always seemed impervious to, were also at work on Karen. She had developed a taste for the larger world, an appetite that island life, for all its charms, could not seem to sate, a sentiment Ruth could relate to from her teenage exile in Shelton. This restlessness only got worse once Anne was out of the house and off to Bellingham with Royce Holiday, leaving Karen alone with her hopelessly uncool parents and her annoying little brother.
“It’s so boring here without Gonzo and Anne,” Karen complained. “There’s nothing to do. I can’t do anything cool anymore.”
“Nonsense,” said Ruth.
“Name one thing!”
“Bowling,” said Ruth.
“I hate bowling.”
“Why don’t you join drama again?”
“It’s so bogus,” she said. “The plays they choose are totally stupid. Our Town? Gimme a break, Mom.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I rather liked The Snow Queen. I thought you were wonderful as Gerda.”
“What a bore,” she said. “Fairy tales.”
“What about a job?” said Ruth. “You could always babysit.”
“No way,” she said. “I’m not changing diapers or playing Chutes and Ladders all night for a lousy three bucks. I want to hang out in town, actually do things.”
“Well, what’s to stop you?” said Ruth. “You can always walk to Winslow after school.”
“I mean Seattle.”
“Well, we can certainly go to Seattle one of these weekends,” Ruth said. “It’d be fun. Maybe we’ll go to the zoo. Or the arboretum. Dad and I could show you the UW campus.”
“I don’t mean with you guys. I mean by myself. I feel like a prisoner on this island.”
“You’ll have to ask your father about going to Seattle.”
“He’ll just say no, like he does to everything.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, isn’t it? The Zeppelin concert, the Laserium, even the dumb skating rink—all big fat nos.”
“He’s only looking out for your well-being,” said Ruth. “It’s his responsibility as your father.”
But Karen obviously wasn’t buying it. Her relationship with Abe grew increasingly contentious as the months wore on. The more Karen railed against his authority, the harder Abe pushed back.
“Absolutely not,” he said about Karen going to Seattle. “Senior year, maybe. And only if you get your grades back up.”
But Karen did not get her grades up. The second semester of sophomore year, they fell from Bs to Cs. No matter that she was grounded for this offense; she just wanted to stay in her room anyway. When Abe took her record player away, it did not provide the incentive he’d hoped for. Her grades continued to slide.
“This all started with Anne and that damn Royce Holiday,” Abe complained to Ruth.
“Careful, Abe, he may just end up being your son-in-law.”
“Over my dead body,” said Abe. “He’s the one that’s filled our daughters’ noggins with all his warmed-over hippie malarky. Dropping out? That’s their answer to everything? That’s how they’re gonna solve the world’s problems? By ignoring them? Just keep on truckin’, huh?”
Karen seemed intent on putting Abe in an early grave with her defiance, and her aloofness, and her shoddy academic performance. And no measure of discipline seemed to improve matters. When, after a late evening at the office, Abe happened to catch Karen disembarking the five thirty boat from Seattle with Tracy Holiday and the Dolinger boy, he grounded her for two weeks. When, on the third night of her sentence, she snuck out her bedroom window and didn’t return until two a.m., Abe grounded her for an additional month and stripped her of her phone privileges. None of it persuaded Karen to change her ways. Winter semester she received a D in biology, a new academic low. She continued her unauthorized forays into the city, arriving home smelling of cigarettes and retreating straight to her room with hardly a word. Such was her defiance, at barely fifteen years old, that it seemed they could not govern the child at all.
At his wit’s end, Abe all but relinquished his parental authority over Karen, opting instead for the path of least resistance. While Anne may have been a handful those last years of high school, Karen proved a burden too heavy to bear. Though Abe was not proud of the fact, it had been a relief to cede his authority. There was no getting through to her. Let her have her damn record player back. Let her hang out with riffraff. Let her learn the hard way.
Twelve-year-old Kyle, meanwhile, short of eating them out of house and home, presented few challenges. He adhered to the rules, pulled As and Bs at Commodore Middle School without much fuss, performed his chores around the farm, turned his bedroom lights out at nine p.m., limited his TV consumption to three hours per day, and rarely defied a parental directive. Still, it seemed they were losing Kyle, too. He no longer entertained his former enthusiasm where family activities were concerned—game nights, movie nights, evening walks, those customs that had made them feel like a family unit. Like his sisters before him, he longed for sovereignty and independence.
It didn’t seem fair, being a parent. You worked, you planned, you executed. You provided for them, sacrificed for them, worried for them, guided them, and comforted them, and what did you get in return? Where was the appreciation? What happened to solidarity, to loyalty, to valuing family above all else? After ten years old they wanted very little to do with you, it seemed. You were their taxi driver at best. At fifteen, you were the archenemy. They didn’t even want your rides anymore; they accepted your money as though they were doing you a favor, sought your blessings begrudgingly. And once they were out of the nest, you were lucky to get a phone call or any kind of acknowledgment at all for your years of effort.
Had they spoiled their children, was that the problem? Had they not instilled in Anne and Karen and Kyle the proper sense of gratitude or respect? Had Abe and Ruth painted themselves into this corner by inviting their children to take their endless support and service for granted? Abe could only imagine how Ruth must have felt at such a thankless return on her investment. For Ruth had done 85 percent of the parenting. Ruth was the one who had sacrificed her autonomy, her dreams, her mornings and afternoons and evenings. Ruth had given the prime of her life to those children. How many novels and books of poetry had gathered dust on her nightstand because she could never quite find a moment to herself? How much self-care had she deferred to bestow that attention on Anne, or Karen, or Kyle?
Thank goodness for little Maddie, the one child who still appreciated and wanted to be around her parents, the only one who did not judge or defy them. Maddie still wanted to follow her mother around the farm, gathering eggs, harvesting vegetables, still wanted to help unload the dishwasher and fold the laundry, to stroll the aisles of Town & Country or Winslow Hardware with Mommy. And Maddie still adored Abe, though he was usually home late from the office and often absent on the weekend. Maddie did not begrudge these truancies, rather treated Daddy’s presence as a novelty, begging him to play Candy Land, or admire her most recent indecipherable Crayola masterpiece—a tree that looked like a mushroom cloud, a flower as tall as a house, a fox shaped like a coffee table with ears.
Despite Abe’s fatigue, when called upon, he never failed to oblige these requests, because he now knew from experience that these precious occasions were numbered. The day would come, and all too soon, when he’d no longer be viewed as a coveted playmate, or someone whose approval was to be greedily sought, but an adversary, an obstacle.