Camden, Maine, 1986
The card went out a month before Christmas. It was a holiday card—that much was immediately apparent due to the red envelope. The photograph on the front of the card was a line of smiling faces in jeans and sweatshirts. Behind, a rugged mountainous landscape cut the cloudless summer sky.
Inside the card, Raymond Jackson had typed up his annual holiday newsletter. It was printed on red paper and folded neatly in quarters to fit inside the envelope. Helen had gone down to MacBride’s on Main Street to have it copied a few hundred times. It was going out to everyone on their list, all the friends and relatives who liked a greeting at this time of year. Helen liked to make a lot of lists, and the Christmas list was one of them, an ever-expanding work in progress over the years.
“Dear folks, hail and hello from the Jackson family on High Street,” it began.
It’s been a booming year for all of us. I’ve had a steady run in my work and fun. The boat publishing business continues, and on the leisure side, Helen and I got out on the water for four days in August with our kids on a double-ended schooner. Went all over Penobscot Bay last August with Dean and his bride, up from New York City. She goes like a dream. Hoping one of these days these kids will produce some boat-nut grandkids for this old fud to teach some sailing to. (Hint hint, kids!)
We’re looking forward to having all our kids home for Christmas, as well as Helen’s mother, Nonnie. Raymond Jr. will be coming from Seattle, with his fiancée, Claire. Jessica is coming in from San Francisco, and Chris will be in from the Farm (the University of Maine in Farmington, for all you out-of-staters). We hope those of you nearby will drop in to toast the season! Helen will be making her usual arsenal of traditional holiday cookies. To those far away, you are nearby in our hearts always. To all we send our best wishes for 1987!
With our family’s love, as ever, to yours.
Helen and Raymond Jackson,
Christmas 1986
Helen had studied calligraphy at Skidmore, and she addressed each card in her careful script. “People like things personalized,” she said. “It never fails to make an impression.”
“You know, I read these things and I want to throw up.” My mother was smoking on her side of the couch in her living room. The Jackson card had arrived with the morning mail on her breakfast tray a few weeks before Christmas.
“I just had to call you and vent,” she told me. “I mean, really. It kills me, to think that a child of mine is caught up in this.”
What bothered her about it was the lineup, specifically my presence in it. “What is a daughter of mine,” she said, “that’s what I’d like to know, what’s a daughter of mine doing in someone else’s Christmas card. It doesn’t seem natural somehow, I’m sorry. There I’ve said it. I’ve said my piece.”
But she hadn’t yet. Her piece. She wasn’t done saying it, and she was digging right in.
“I mean, ‘folks,’ please. Your father would roll in his grave. Using ‘folks’ that way is tacky, dearie, plain and simple. It’s ‘folktale,’ ‘folk dance,’ ‘folklore,’ fine, permissible. But not as a form of greeting. People are not ‘folks,’ they are people. Their tradition is folk. ‘Folks,’ no. I’ve always told you children that. And now here you are, caught up in it.”
“In what, exactly?”
“It, dearie. You know full well what I mean. You should be home for Christmas. Not gallivanting off. With some other family.”
I could hear the draw of her cigarette. My mother managed through years of practice to get her smoking to take on expression. This was cigarette smoking in “I just had to call and vent” mode, the indignant inhale, the agitated exhale. Her smoking repertoire was as changeable as her mood. There was dreamy, nostalgic smoking, in which the exhale was long and lazy and the atmosphere thick with anecdote. There was busy smoking—economic quick puffs in rapid succession—or busy with no hands free, speaking on the phone and writing, say, or sorting through place cards for a party, in which the cigarette was held in a clench between her lips. Then there was brooding smoking, the deep inhales and the long, whooshing exhales. Finally, there was dramatic smoking as proclamation, lighting a cigarette, rarely putting it to her mouth but instead waving it like a torch as she made a point or two, letting the ash grow long until it listed to one side and eventually fell off. Even extinguishing a cigarette had meaning. It was an energetic stub, repeated any number of times until the butt was thoroughly smashed in the ashtray. The most energetic of stub-outs usually accompanied the “I just had to call and vent” repeated smoking she did around the time of the holidays ever since I’d been married to Dean. Always, the filter was stained a deep red by the end of it all from her lipstick.
“Trust me, baby girl. Idiomatically, we don’t speak the same language as those people. Did you even see this picture before it was sent? It’s odd.”
Actually, there was something somewhat odd about it. Perhaps it was the uneven terrain, or the tilt of the camera, but it seemed as if everyone in the Christmas card photograph was standing on an angle, leaning in on one another as though if one dropped out, the family pose would entirely collapse. At the center was Helen, in a pink sweater and matching windbreaker. The Raymonds, Senior and Junior, were on either end of the lineup, as if bracing us in.
“To think,” she said, “that a child of mine. Jesus.”
A week before the trip to Camden, my sister Catherine and I were in my kitchen in New York, trying to make marzipan. We agreed I needed to bring something with me to Camden as a present. Something. We had taken food coloring and mixed it in empty mustard jars. She shaped hers into oranges, bananas, and pears. I was making whales, because I knew Dean’s family liked whales even though I couldn’t be sure they liked marzipan.
I was telling her about the sleeping arrangements in the Jackson household during the vacation. “Dean and I have to sleep in the master bedroom,” I told her as we mixed colors with the ends of tiny paintbrushes we’d bought at the hardware store. For some reason, the sleep arrangements were what was bothering me. “Raymond is staying on the pull-out in his study, and Helen is staying in her guest room at the top of the stairs, in one of the twin beds—Chris is sleeping in the other.”
“Why him? Why not the girl?”
“The girl refuses. Jessica.” My sisters refused to remember Jessica’s name; they had no room for another sister in my life, even an in-law sister.
Catherine’s tongue poked out slightly from her mouth as she worked. “I’m really not half bad at this, you know? I think we may have stumbled on something.”
“Jessica is staying on the couch in the living room, and Nonnie, the grandmother, is staying up in Chris’s room. No one knows what the fuck to do with Raymond Jr. when and if he arrives with the fiancée. They are fighting over whether to get married or not, and they might not even make it. She’s got cold feet. They’re coming from Seattle and they’re planning to erect a tent to sleep in.”
Catherine was not big on camping trips. “She’s gonna have more than just her feet cold in that case,” she said. “That West Coast girl’s going to have some icy you-know-whats.”
“They are setting it up in the attic.”
“Well, we’ll call at regular intervals and check in on you,” Catherine said.
I brushed elaborate eyelashes and red mouths on my whales. I wanted sensuous whales at the family gathering.
Catherine watched.
“These whales,” I said as I worked the brush, “if nothing else, these whales are going to get through this thing with grace and style, even if it kills them.”
Catherine laughed. “And they are killer whales.”
In Camden at Christmas, there were annual town rituals. During the week of the holidays a “living crèche” was enacted on the green outside the library, so if you drove up from the south, you’d see actual town residents wearing long burlap robes over their parkas, gathered around a makeshift manger. Organized by the Congregational church, the “Congo,” the shifts were four hours long, pending weather. Originally the holiday committee borrowed livestock from a farmer in Hope to round out the nativity scene, but that had changed a few years earlier due to a runaway sheep. The sheep tore out of the manger, up the road, jumped off the dock outside Cappy’s, and drowned. A papier-mâché menagerie made by the church guild over the summer was pressed into service ever after.
Someone from the Congo always called the Jackson household right after Thanksgiving to see if any of the three boys might be coming home. The three would make perfect wise men, the Congo organizers annually agreed, especially if one or more had conveniently grown a beard over the year, as one or more invariably had.
The day after Thanksgiving, wreaths with red velvet bows were hung on all the lampposts along Main Street. Dodge Everett, who ran the car repair store in town, dropped in to pick them up at the Women’s Collective, where they were hand-made. Weather permitting, they remained up until Twelfth Night, when Dodge came by in a battered pickup truck to take them down. The routine of this tradition relaxed the town around the bustle of the year’s end; it was a predictable rite and as such could be counted on when often nothing else could. Yet everyone remembered the year a freak ice storm scattered pine and ribbons all over the harbor two days before New Year’s. The sudden mess unnerved the whole town until gradually the last of the flotsam of greenery and ribbons rode out silently into Penobscot Bay in the dawn of the new year.
There was also the traditional reappearance of the town’s young people, those who had left Camden to go on to college and jobs elsewhere and returned home for the break. Up and down the street, as Dean and I did our Christmas shopping, people stopped to greet him. “Mr. Foul Shot!” one man called out across the street at us. “Back in the flesh!”
Sometimes in the middle of the night, when Dean couldn’t sleep, his hands would jut up in the air, making mock foul shots in the dark. In those moments, I knew whatever was bothering him, he was calming himself down by working his way back from his present to his sweet past.
When it came to local sports, Dodge Everett, also the high school basketball coach, was a well-thumbed almanac. “How about that game in Lincolnville—’75, I think it was—when you guys really showed them how to play hoops?” Dodge said. In the chill of the December afternoon, he and Dean making clouds with their breath as they spoke, Dodge counted out the scores of winning games on his gloved fingers. “You come by and see us, Dean-o. Sure would be a thrill for the kids, having you show up at team practice one day. Local hero and all.”
He looked at me and winked. “Mr. Foul Shot, he is. That’s our boy.” He punched Dean in the arm. “Come on by and see the old gym. Give the kids a thrill.”
“Honey, I hear you ran into Dodge in town this afternoon,” Helen said. We were at the dinner table. Red candles glowed in the candelabra. Nonnie made little figurines out of red yarn that she called Cossacks. They lined the mantelpiece and the sideboard. In the living room, they dangled off branches of the Christmas tree like doomed mountaineers.
Dean’s brother Chris poured wine into the cut glass goblets. He creased his brow as he poured, careful to keep the measurements equal, the bottle held just over, never touching, the rim of each glass. “I’m perfect at this,” he said. “A real sommelier.”
At the head of the table, Raymond Sr. was carving the lamb. In the kitchen Helen poured the drippings into a gravy boat, shook mint jelly out of the jar. “Dodge’s wife, Josie, called to tell me he’d seen you, honey,” she said as she walked in.
“I saw Nelly James,” said Nonnie. Nonnie was ninety-one. She had been celebrating Christmas with Helen and Raymond since they had married thirty-five years earlier. When her husband, Lester, was still alive, the two would drive up from their home in Westerly, Rhode Island, together. Now she was widowed, and Chris always drove down from college to retrieve her. She sat at the foot of the dining table in a pale purple sweater suit. “Nelly came by to have tea with me. I was busy, what with the Cossacks to finish and all, but we had a nice chat.”
“Nelly came by to have a nice visit with you, Mother,” said Helen, setting the gravy boat down at her husband’s side of the table. “Drat.” She swept up some overflow with a finger and licked it.
“Jesus, Mom,” said Chris. “Do we really need your spit in the gravy?”
“That Nelly James never misses a chance to come by and poke her head in,” Nonnie continued.
Helen held out her hands and smiled across the candles, across the bowls of vegetables, across the roast, to her husband. In the candlelight, Raymond’s bifocals were flickering shields of glass.
“Can we do a toast?” she asked.
Everyone groaned.
“We’re just getting started on this grub here, Mom,” said Dean.
Helen took the hands of the two sitting closest to her, her mother and Dean. “Now. I just want to thank you all for being here with me this year,” she said. “It always means a lot, but for me, this year, it’s just very special.” She looked around at her family. “We’re family, first and foremost. I’m very grateful for that and I thank you all.”
During the visit of the boat, the summer before, Raymond and Helen had first told us they were going to have a trial separation. Four days on the double-ended schooner in Penobscot Bay, where there was nowhere to run, they decided would be a good chance to claim our undivided attention. One night, the night before we set sail, I thought I heard Raymond coughing, followed by a light step that creaked the floorboards down the hallway to the back stairs. Fingers dialed the phone by the half bathroom; then the receiver hung up. But it may not have been Raymond at all but rather the after-drizzle of a dream: noises imagined in the vulnerability of half sleep. I would lie on my back a long time in the still house, Dean’s breathing steady beside me, until I heard breakfast sounds. It started with classical music on the radio. The refrigerator door would open, then shut. But no smells, no other sounds. Because breakfast was not toast, or bacon, or anything that smelled like Helen’s usual cooking those summer mornings. And you could not hear cornflakes getting their milk splattered on. At least not with my ears.
As we sailed out of the harbor the following morning, the hills over Camden were soft and purple against the dark blue August sky. Helen put her hands on her hips and breathed in the sea air. “Purple mountains majesty,” she said. “You know where those founding fathers got that idea if you look back at our town.”
Raymond adjusted things, pulling at sails and re-coiling ropes. Occasionally he asked Dean to do something and they worked in tandem, barely a word between them. Gradually the busy community lost definition and melted into a blur, the white steeple on the Congregational church the last focal point, shrinking smaller and smaller, finally just a toothpick, then gone altogether as we bounded out.
We anchored in the cove in the evening and for dinner we ate lobster, tearing at the bright bodies, tossing the shells over the side. Dean skimmed a lobster tail across the smooth water. It didn’t skip exactly, but made a few shaky ruptures on the surface before it sank.
“A lousy substitute,” Dean said to his father.
Raymond shrugged. “You’ve gotta try everything.” This was Raymond’s motto, handed to him from his stint in the Camden volunteer fire brigade. “When you don’t know what you’re going to need,” he’d say about whatever, “roll everything.”
“Honey, you need another sweater?” Helen asked me.
“She’s always cold,” said Dean.
“Oh, I know, she’s our city girl,” Helen said. She sat on a boat cushion, the kind with two handles, for easy throwing to overboard victims. She stirred sugar into a mug of coffee. The steam swirled, misting her face so she looked like a silent-film heroine. “Still, honey, I think you could use a new one. Let me make you one for Christmas.”
Since Helen had knit me the red claret sweater during the visit on the lake, I wore it every visit I made to Camden. “I bet you could have fun with this, dear,” she told me as she fitted it to me, stretching a tape measure along my back as I held my arms out in a T.
“Anyone, anything else?” Helen asked. “Anything hot?”
There were times I regarded Helen almost as an exotic animal, her behavior both fascinating and strange. A life made up of unconditional offers. Fudge, sweaters, hot drinks.
“Pizza,” said Raymond, “if you’re calling out.”
“Cute, Daddy,” Helen said. “Daddy, real cute.”
But that was not what marked the visit of the boat. It came later, just barely twilight.
“Mom and I have something to say,” Raymond said. Dean and I were lying up on the cabin roof, side by side on our stomachs; below us Helen and Raymond sat in the cockpit.
“We’re going right down the line with this,” Raymond said. As he said it, his right hand cut the air in front of him. The line was Raymond Jr., Dean, Jessica, then Chris. Whenever Helen and Raymond had something important to say, they announced it in order of birth.
“We phoned Raymond Jr. yesterday,” Helen told Dean, almost apologetically.
“So tell then,” Dean said. “What’s the big news?” Dean hated it when Raymond Jr. knew something he didn’t.
Raymond looked down at his hands, and so did everyone else. Everyone watched Raymond fold his fingers in on themselves, then open his palms, then close them again. Then he opened his palms once more, straining them back, letting all his fingers wiggle at once. Here’s the church, I was thinking. Here’s the steeple.
“The fact is,” Raymond said. He looked up at Helen with a slant half smile, then looked down again. “It seems I have fallen in love with another woman.”
Helen put her hand on Raymond’s back, then withdrew it. For slow preposterous seconds, no one spoke. For starters, the idea seemed absurd. Raymond in love. Raymond with his gold bifocals, his skinny little legs. Raymond romancing? Raymond Jackson in love?
It seemed too awkward and potentially nauseating to ask for details, besides which, after Raymond spoke, Helen started to cry. Quiet whimpers, sniffles mainly, her chin resting on her fist. I realized I’d never heard Helen cry. Usually a laugh was her guard for everything. A lusty head-thrown-back kind of whoop that pushed everything else back inside.
“‘Seems’?” Dean said. “As in, you’re not sure yet? Seems you have fallen in love, Dad? Really? ‘Seems’? That’s the word you’re going with? Come fucking on.”
“We haven’t made any permanent decisions yet,” Helen finally got out, wiping her eyes. “We’re going to give it ’til Christmas, right, Daddy?” She groped for Raymond’s hand and he let her have it. Pink parka, pink fingernails, pink face.
“This is pretty disgusting,” Dean said after a while. He shuddered.
“What do you mean, honey?” Helen asked. “I don’t understand.” She asked him pleasantly, as if she had just asked him to explain long division.
Dean went on. “Look at you, Mom. Sitting there like a fucking wounded animal. Dad, I want to kick you in your back, straighten out your posture, man. What the hell?”
“Okay, fair enough,” Raymond said. “You’ve got a right to be mad. I am okay with that. I deserve that.” He looked up at me. “I want to know what our city girl thinks,” he said, his eyes blinking calmly.
What did I think. They were supposed to be predictable—not like my parents, where potential surprises lay behind every waft of smoke, every can of Budweiser—and to want the same things. That had always struck me about Raymond and Helen. There was never any vying over decisions, or if there was, no one knew it. They moved as one complacent force through a lifetime of card games and homemade sweaters and cheese sticks.
A million words floated in my head. A million random, useless words. “I don’t know. You guys always seemed so perfect to me.” As I spoke, Helen nodded, sniffling. “Well, I guess now you seem more normal.”
Helen laughed through tears. She grabbed a lobster shell that had fallen to the bottom of the boat and tossed it over her shoulder. “Normal!” She turned and patted her husband’s knee. “That’s a new one, isn’t it, Daddy?”
Raymond cast his eyes out to sea, as if looking for something, a fin, a periscope, anything to distract us with. Family time was supposed to be happy time.
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I’ll tell you this.” She gave a long blow into her tissue. “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a minute.” She smiled, her eyes wet and bright. “Not too many people can say that, you know?”
As soon as the photos from our wedding were sent to Camden, Helen and Raymond looked at the images of themselves and had a reaction. I should have worn a darker blue, Helen thought. Dark hides more, it’s more forgiving to a figure. I can’t possibly be that heavy. Raymond thought, I should get contact lenses, those gold-rimmed specs make me look like an old grandpa. I can’t possibly be that ancient. They ordered no copies of photographs of just the two of them. Soon after this, they started taking a journal-writing class at the local Y in Camden. “Do a little something new,” Helen said. “Bring in a little spice back to the old marriage,” Raymond added. It started as a kind of experiment, a therapy exercise. All the couples they were friendly with in town were doing some form of therapy, and they were eager to try. In class, they were asked to keep a notebook and to write in it every day. To write down whatever came into their mind, for forty-five minutes. Raymond usually did this in his den. Helen preferred the living room, listening to classical music on the stereo. They followed the class instructions carefully. Put it all out there, the instructor encouraged the class. See what you can learn when you set pen to paper and let your mind roam where it will.
Helen wrote a lot of lists. Shopping lists, Christmas lists, wish lists, a To Do list and a Not To Do list. “This is one of the things I have to stop doing,” Helen wrote on the Not To Do list. “I have to stop speaking for Raymond. I have got to stop assuming I know what’s on his mind. Because I don’t. I obviously don’t.”
“The things I miss most” was another list. “Cigarettes, my brother Bob (Bob was killed in World War II), summers when the kids were young, my father’s clambakes on the beach, sometimes, Homer Winfree.” But she changed that last one. “No, the idea of Homer, not Homer himself.” Homer had been the boy who came to court her while Raymond was off in the war. Homer had asthma and couldn’t go to the front, and spent the long Sunday afternoons of the war in Nonnie’s kitchen making light conversation and accepting the women’s offers of tea and cake.
Raymond wrote about a lot of things. His family, his friends, his kids. He wrote a lot about expectations. “I would like to do something I’m proud of, something on my own.” The words “my own” came up a lot. “I love Helen, but I need some time away from her,” he wrote once. “I’d like to be more on my own.” Again and again, the same phrase was repeated, practically word for word: “I need some time alone.” Finally, Raymond told his notebook about Cathleen. “There’s this girl in my office. Well, not a girl, a woman.” Cathleen was just forty. She had straight dark hair and wide-set eyes. For years, she told him one day, she had had a crush on him. She liked his gentle manner and his easy gait. Now they were having lunch together, taking their separate cars to a diner in Rockport. The first time, he was just back from the wedding in East Hampton. He told her all about it. About having to have the rehearsal dinner clambake under the tent and not on the beach as planned (the caterer was not up to Grampa’s standards, he added), and about the tennis matches by the cottage. Then he told her about John McCulloch having a sudden stroke. “The guy just up and died, like that,” he told Cathleen. “Daughter’s wedding. One minute there, and the next, breathing with a ventilator in the next town.” Cathleen’s eyes widened. “I don’t want to go like that,” Raymond told Cathleen. “It really makes you think. Started me thinking, anyway.” Cathleen nodded. She patted Raymond’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered across the table as he drank his chowder. “Life is short,” Raymond told the notebook. “Sometimes you have just got to seize the day. It could have been me, hooked up to machines. You never know what’s going to hit you.” He told that to Cathleen. “Seize the day,” he told her, as they guiltily spooned up chowder at the Rockport Diner. She nodded. Outside the nip of late fall was in the air. Soon the first flakes of snow would dust the harbor town. Suddenly, Raymond confessed to the notebook, he was thinking about Cathleen all the time.
“Confidence,” Helen wrote on her wish list. “I feel like such a boob all the time. Raymond says nothing has happened yet between him and Cathleen, but he thinks he might be falling in love.”
“I feel like an adolescent,” Raymond wrote. “Or, that’s its springtime.” But he crossed out “springtime”—“(Too cornball),” he wrote in the margin as an editorial note to himself. Over the winter and into the next spring, Raymond and Cathleen followed their now familiar routine along Route 1 to Rockport, or sometimes all the way to Wiscasset for ice cream. He would drive first, leading the way; she’d follow, waving to him at stop signs so he’d see her happy face in his rearview mirror. It made his day, those glimpses of his junior associate in the rearview mirror of his car heading to the diner with him. “Maybe it’s a phase,” Raymond wrote in his notebook as spring turned to summer, and summer again into fall. “Do I hope it’s a phase, or don’t I?”
“Will things ever be the same again?” Helen wrote. But that launched her into another list. “People I can’t forgive: My mother, for crying all the time, over everything.” When word came that Helen’s brother Bob was dead, Nonnie cried so hard it’s all Helen remembers of her adolescence. A small once-resilient woman crumpled by grief. “Bob, for dying. I always thought we could have gotten along.” Helen was a male-oriented woman, she always said. When the “hard core” of Camden used to get together, it was Helen who always joked around with the men while her friends Nelly and Jan kept to themselves. “Raymond. Yes, Raymond Jackson too,” Helen wrote on her list the week we were due to arrive in Camden for Christmas. “I’m finally getting really ticked off about this.” But when Raymond was around, Helen was eager, attentive, like a schoolgirl with a crush. “I thought I had been doing everything right,” she wrote. “But I must have been doing it wrong.”
“I can’t let him go, I can’t let him!” she wrote one day before all her children were due to return home for Christmas. “All I care about is him!” Then, “I hate myself like this,” she wrote the next.
“How’s it going?” Catherine asked, calling halfway into the Jackson family dinner. She called from our mother’s apartment, where they were having the annual Christmas Eve gathering. I dragged the kitchen phone cord around the corner and hunched on the back stairs.
“So far, so good. But the shit’s about to hit the fan, I think.”
“Well, you hang in there. We’ll call later, after the Wall family have taken their sugared-up children and gone home. Lou Anne Wall hit the bourbon pretty hard tonight, before it went into the milk punch, and now she’s singing that song about beans and rice and coconut oil again.”
The phone cord swayed back and forth, a silent pendulum. My mother picked up on another extension.
“Dearie, is it you? Jesus, that girl has got to stop.”
“Who?”
“Lou Anne. Lou Anne Wall. She’s my dear friend, but she has no voice. I daresay she’s terrifying Johanna in the kitchen.
“Ma, everything terrifies Johanna,” I said.
“Never you mind. You’re not here. So. Tell all. How’s by you?”
“Nothing to tell. We’re having dinner.”
“I see.”
“And so far, that’s about it.”
“Un-hum. I see.”
She waited.
“Ma?” said Catherine. “They’re having dinner. Shouldn’t we get off?”
“Whatever.” She sighed. It was the wistful sigh that often preceded the nostalgia cigarette, and promptly I could hear her lighting up.
In the dining room, they were calling my name. “Yoo-hoo,” Helen called out. “No dessert without the daughter-in-law!”
“Ugh, I heard that, dearie.” The first exhale of the cigarette ended up not being her nostalgic/wistful slow one but her scoffing/indignant fast one. “Jesus.”
There was a loud trill in the background. “Jesus, someone shut that girl off,” my mother said into the extension. “Catherine, be a dear and unplug Mrs. Wall so there can be Peace on Earth this holiday season, will you please? Tell her I have something to show her in the library. That will distract her.”
When Catherine rang off the line, my mother said to me, “I don’t like it, dearie. I don’t like it one bit. That family is trying to pretend everything is nice and normal when that father is cascading, in full view of you all, into a midlife crisis.”
I thought of Nonnie’s Cossacks on the Christmas tree, hanging by a thread to a branch. Raymond Jackson, hanging from the family tree, willing himself to let go.
Only Nonnie didn’t know what was going on. She knew a bit of it. She knew that Helen and Raymond had been having some problems. Helen had alluded to it on the phone. No one had yet told her the full extent: that Raymond had rented an apartment in town and that for the entire autumn, until he returned a few days earlier with a pillowcase of laundry and another filled with presents, Helen had been living in the house alone. And only Nonnie had no idea about the other woman, Cathleen, whom he thought he might be in love with. No one had met her yet, this Cathleen, no one but Chris, who had returned a book years ago to his father’s office when she was the receptionist. They all agreed, all the kids, that didn’t count, because nothing was going on yet, and besides, Chris couldn’t remember a thing about her except dark hair.
What Raymond and Helen didn’t know was that after dinner, after Nonnie had been put to bed, the kids would call a family powwow and demand that the air be cleared. “I will not spend a week up there pretending we are one big happy family,” Dean’s sister, Jessica, had insisted, “when we’re not. When that’s just about the last damn thing we are.”
“So thank you all,” Helen said, finishing her toast. “Thank you for coming home.”
Raymond Jr. and his fiancée, Claire, were flying east from Seattle, where he had been living for ten years and where they met in a group house on Lopez Island. In October, he’d given her an ultimatum: marry me, or that’s it.
Raymond Jr. was a nester, he kept telling Claire, kept telling everyone else. “Look,” he’d say, “you’re not getting any younger. You know?”
Ever since Dean had gotten married, it had been weighing on Raymond Jr.’s mind, marriage. He hated it when Dean achieved any developmental milestone before he did. On the way east on the plane, Claire and Raymond Jr. had had a fight. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t want to be with you,” Claire said. “It’s all so public, getting married, though. All these people I don’t even know asking me what kind of china pattern I want. Who says I want china at all in my life?”
“Okay,” said Raymond Jr. “Forget the announcement, forget the china.” But Raymond Jr. never knew when to stop. “Let’s forget the whole thing,” he said next, and for the rest of the trip, the plane ride, renting the car in Portland, the ride up Route 1 to Camden, Raymond Jr. thought about it. Bringing his fiancée home after years of imagining it. First he was excited; then he was furious. All this time he’d been telling himself, telling Claire, what a perfect marriage his parents had. “Marriage doesn’t work,” Claire would say. “It’s not a natural situation.”
“No,” Raymond Jr. would tell her, “wait ’til you meet my parents. Thirty-five years, and still happy.” Goddamn Dad, Raymond Jr. was thinking, driving up the dark roads along the coast. Asshole.
Raymond Jr. and Claire arrived at the house a little after 8 p.m. Everyone rushed out to greet them at once, warm and smelling of fire smoke and wine. Only Nonnie remained at the table, spooning extra sugar into her teacup, blinking in the candlelight.
“You’re just in time,” Jessica told her brother. “We’re calling a powwow as soon as Mom puts Nonnie to bed.”
“You have beautiful eyebrows,” Nonnie told Claire when she was brought to the table to meet her.
“Come on now, Mother,” Helen said, grabbing Nonnie by the elbow and helping her up. “Bedtime.”
Nonnie’s legs were like thin matchsticks, poking out from her kilted skirt. Every Christmas someone in the family would give her a pair of running shoes for support, but she never wore them. She insisted on her patent leather pumps with square heels like blocks. She walked up the stairs in small steps, her hand gripping her daughter’s arm. “That’s it, Mother,” Helen said, pushing her lightly from behind.
The family settled into the den, arranging pillows, carrying mugs of tea and kindling for the woodstove. Helen brought in a glass platter filled with Christmas cookies. There were all her traditional ones: the coconut-rolled rum balls, the almond macaroons, the jelly wafers, and the chocolate bark, plus a few dried-out marzipan whales with long eyelashes and red lips.
“Hey, Mom, slide those rum balls over here,” Jessica said. She was lying on the floor by the fire, one leg resting on a knee.
“I’m having one of these delicious whales,” said Helen, plucking one with a forefinger and thumb. She chewed. “Cute,” she said.
“These your whales?” Chris asked me.
“They’re marzipan. You have to like marzipan.”
“Take ’em,” said Dean. He took a handful of chocolate bark off the platter. “I’m not much of a marzipan man myself.”
For a week, Helen had been baking Christmas cookies. They sat in tins and boxes in the storage nook by the back staircase. All week, she worked at it in the kitchen alone, filling the empty house with the smells of baking. “It will be like any other Christmas,” she told herself, told her “hard core” friends Nelly James and Jan Brice.
“Be careful, Helen,” they’d warn her, but Helen, with the holiday music already playing on the stereo, hardly seemed to hear her friends.
“I’m so excited!” she told me over the phone. “Waiting for everyone to come home. So busy.”
So busy, just waiting.
“I guess I better start this thing off,” Raymond said. He sat in his plaid La-Z-Boy by the fire. He tipped the chair back and forth softly. Usually, after dinner on Christmas Eve, the Jacksons were in separate bedrooms or in the basement, busy wrapping presents. Chris and Dean would sit in their childhood room, still covered in basketball pictures and banners, and pick out songs on the guitar. Jessica liked to rummage through boxes of old letters and books she stored in the attic. She liked to take a glass of wine up there and get softly tipsy as she unpacked her past. Then, at 10:30, everyone put on scarves and coats and drove down to the candlelight service at the Congregational church. “Hitting the Congo” was a Jackson family tradition.
“So, start things off,” Raymond Jr. said. “Let’s hear what you have to say, Dad.” He crossed his arms. In Seattle, Raymond Jr. had almost completed his training to be a family therapist, and this was his big chance to show off to the family. “So, Dad, let’s hear it.” His hands tucked deeper into his armpits.
Raymond Sr. glided two fingers over the empty ring finger on his left hand. He glided over and over, looking at the fire in the woodstove. “I guess Mom has kept you all pretty up to date on what’s been happening here,” he started out. “And I’m grateful for that.” He looked in her direction and she nodded back. “For the past few months, Mom and I have been living separately. But we both wanted me home for Christmas, with you all. We both very much wanted that.” Raymond looked over at Helen’s face, and she nodded again. The logs hissed and sparked as they burned.
“To: One and All,” Helen’s letter had said. “From: the Old Squaw of Camden.”
She had written the letter to her children the day after Thanksgiving, right after Raymond had told her he wanted to think about a divorce. She had written it and gone directly to MacBride’s on Harbor Avenue to have it xeroxed four times. “Daddy and I are talking about Xmas plans!” the letter had started out. “We’re both so thrilled to think of all our young people making the big trip home!” Then the letter had a smiling face, followed by, “Just today, they put the wreaths up on Main Street!”
The second paragraph went, “Daddy and I haven’t seen each other much this fall, but every day, I feel his presence in me more and more. What we have together is very strong. I think he knows that, and I want all of you to know it too. We will always be a family!”
“Oh, family policy,” the final paragraph read. “Everyone bring home five little presents for the giant stocking. And no duds, Chris!” The family stocking was a large red wool sock the length of a leg and the width of a torso that Helen had knit back when the kids were in grade school. It was passed around on Christmas morning and one by one the family took presents out, only replacing them if they had been the ones to put it in. The stocking was passed until it was empty, and everyone had a collection of little presents and wads of discarded wrapping by their sides. The last time the Jacksons had all been home for Christmas together, all Chris had put in the stocking were matchbooks and rubber bands, all neatly wrapped in emerald green tissue. “I love you all!” Helen concluded. “From, a very excited Mom!”
On the bottom of each individual copy, Helen had added personal extras. “Chris, honey,” she had written to her youngest, “no matter what happens, I will always be your mother.” On Raymond Jr.’s she had written, “I look forward to having Claire in our family group.” She added nothing to her daughter Jessica’s copy. I imagine she tried, that she stood in the copy shop holding her pen high over the letter, but that no words came. “Jessica’s such a grown-up girl,” she often told me with a sigh. “I don’t even know how to talk to her anymore.” In the copy shop, she might have thought that and then wondered, Have I ever known how to talk to her? Dean’s copy had one simple word in small letters across the bottom. “Help” is what Helen wrote.
“Well, Dad, I’ve just got to ask you,” Dean said. “You’ve been married thirty-five years, and you think you can just walk out on it?” He looked up and caught his father’s eye. Raymond Sr. nodded at him to go on. “I think you’re a real wimp.”
“I think you’re a jerk,” Jessica said. “And I’m damn pissed.”
Helen and Raymond had always encouraged honesty in their children. “My kids call a spade a spade,” Helen had boasted to her friends Nelly and Jan again and again. “Raymond and I are always so astounded at how much they pick up.”
“A total ass-wipe,” Jessica added.
“I have a question for you,” Raymond Jr. leaned back in his chair, his arms still tight against his chest. “Have you two considered a marriage counselor?”
“No,” said Raymond Sr. to Raymond Jr. “No, kiddo. There just doesn’t seem to be any point.”
“But there is a point, honey,” Helen said. “I mean, we could look back, reexamine.” As she spoke, her hands began to move, rising in circles around her. “Find out what went wrong, what we could do better. Plenty of people have great success with the new techniques.” She looked at her eldest son. “Don’t they, Raymond Jr., honey?”
“No. I guess that’s not what I want right now,” Raymond Sr. said.
“Now?” Raymond Jr. asked. “Or ever?”
“I don’t think so.” Raymond Sr. bowed his head. “Wow, that’s not so easy to admit,” he told the floor. “Wow.”
“Think so, what?” Helen asked.
“Mom, Jesus.” Jessica spoke from the carpet. “Get with the program. Listen to what the guy’s telling you. He wants out.” Jessica looked up at her father. “Doesn’t anyone understand English around here?”
Jessica and her father had already had this discussion. “Jess, I’m calling to tell you, I’m going to divorce Mom,” he had said. He had called her at work the week after Thanksgiving—she was the only one. He’d tried to meet Dean when he’d been in New York for a sales meeting in early December, but Dean had been out of town and never returned the call. Raymond Jr. was too far away, and Chris—he and Helen wanted to spare Chris as long as they could.
Jessica had just come back to her office from a lunchtime aerobics class. Her desk was piled high with messages and faxes. “I’m trying to quit smoking, and he goes right ahead and hits me with this,” she told all her siblings over the phone. “I mean, what the hell? Does he think calling me at work is a great way to tell me he’s fucking some chick and ruining our family?”
“What do you have to say about it, Mom?” Dean asked. “No one ever thinks to ask Mom. Does anyone else see this besides me?”
Everyone suddenly looked at Helen.
“Go, Mom,” said Chris, “your turn,” as if it were her turn at charades.
Helen drew a deep breath. “Raymond Jackson,” Helen started, because whenever she had something important to say about her husband, she always used his whole name. She folded her hands on her lap. “Raymond Jackson is at the very core of my existence.” She smiled weakly.
“That is ridiculous,” Raymond Jr. said. He shook his head. “Sorry, Mom. Wrong answer. No one is the core of someone else’s existence.”
“What a lot of horserot this is!” Jessica yelled. “I can’t stand it.”
“See?” said Raymond Jr. “Feminist no-no. We’re talking feminist no-no here, Mom.”
“Wait, I don’t think she said ‘the core,’” I said quietly to Raymond Jr. “I think she said ‘at the core.’ There’s a difference.”
“That’s right!” Helen waved a finger at me. “Our city girl’s got it.”
“It’s still ridiculous,” said Jessica. “He’s a dishrag, Mom. The guy’s a loser. Look what he’s doing to this fucking family.”
From the La-Z-Boy, Raymond Sr. spoke. He rocked back and forth easily in his favorite chair. His fingers gripped the armrests. “I think we’ve done enough calling of names around here, folks,” he said.
“Damn,” said Raymond Jr. It was one of the things he was trying to get on top of in family-therapy training: don’t let it digress to name-calling. “Did you just catch that?” he asked Claire. “I blew it.”
Claire sat beside Raymond Jr. on the loveseat in silence. As she listened, she twirled the edges of her long ponytail between two fingers. Her silver-framed glasses made her look very wise, but also very distant. Raymond Jr. also wore his brown hair in a ponytail, though it was a short one that flipped back up in a curlicue around the base of his neck.
“I don’t think,” she said to Raymond Jr. in slow, measured words, “you’re supposed to tell anyone they have the ‘wrong answer’ either, honey. And they’ve been name-calling this whole conversation. You only just heard it.”
The phone rang and Chris grabbed it. “Jackson family psych ward,” he said. “We specialize in nuts in ruts.” He listened. “Oh, yeah. Hi. Of course. She’s right here.” He mouthed to me, “It’s your mom.”
Helen put her head in her hands.
“Saved by the fucking bell,” said Jessica. “Thank God. Let’s stop this nonsense and get out the eggnog. It’s almost time to hit the Congo.”
“What now?” the familiar voice hissed into the telephone. In the background, carols played on the stereo in my mother’s living room. “O Holy Night.”
Evidently Mrs. Wall had gotten into the bourbon again. “Night deeviiii-yun,” Mrs. Wall merrily wailed.
“Are they holding their voodoo sessions again up there?” my mother wanted to know.
“You got it,” I merrily replied.
“I can’t stand it. I’ve said time and again, you don’t do these kinds of things without a professional present, dearie. You mark my words. Something is going to blow up.”
“You just may have a point there, Ma.”
“Something is going to blow sky-high. I just don’t like that a child of mine—”
“I am a grown woman, you know, Ma.”
“Not to me you’re not, you never will be, so there. Mark my words on this one.”
“It’s Christmas,” said my sister Darcy on the extension. “We love you!”
“Much love to everyone up there except that bastard father, behaving the way he is. Sweet and kind, everyone thought. So ha to that! And ‘folks,’ dear god, he says ‘folks.’ I’ll leave it at that. It’s too much, girls.”
“Peace on Earth,” added Catherine.
Mrs. Wall rang out in song. “Deeee-viii-yuuun . . . O night, O night deeevine,” her voice insisted.
At the door, Dean crossed his arms. He was already in his parka for church.
“Mrs. Wall is singing,” I explained. I held out the phone so he could hear.
“Cathy,” my mother whispered to my sister on the phone, “the woman must stop her singing. She doesn’t have the voice. It’s like a ruptured duck. And in my household. No one bothers to tell her.”
I missed them. They were my team. My small army of women. The living room would be warm, the radiators ticking. Platters of salmon on black bread, and small disks of caviar on toast. Outside, the lights on the Christmas trees would shine all the way down Park Avenue. The smells would be deep cinnamon, evergreen, and clove, and Mrs. Wall would be in the foyer in a velvet muumuu, stationed under the mistletoe in the door frame, a goblet of milk punch in her hand, bright pink lipstick staining the rim of her glass, her eyes looking off dreamily at the chandelier as she sang.
“I have to go, you guys,” I told them. “It’s time for the service at the church.”
My mother let out a short laugh. “First, they sit around insulting each other, then they go pray.” She lowered her voice. I could hear the exhale of her cigarette smoke. “I simply can’t stand a daughter of mine involved.”
“Ho-ho-ho,” my sister Darcy put in.
“A fine Christmas, girls,” my mother added. “Jesus Christ.”
Heading toward Main Street but turning off, away from Route 68, the road soon became sparser. Slowly the bed-and-breakfasts and smattering of houses thinned out. The Camden Hills lay to the left, silent in the darkness. It was a clear night, and the lighthouse on Curtis Island stood sentry just offshore. The Christmas candles in the windows of the lone estate on Hound’s Tooth Head glowed as we passed. As the road away from Camden narrowed, it curved into the farmland on Appleton Ridge, where a young man named Jerry Grantham had been killed two years earlier when his truck skidded on glare ice late one winter afternoon.
“He should have had chains,” Jessica said. She had waited for me, the others already headed to the Congo in Raymond’s station wagon, all except Raymond Jr. and Claire, who had stayed at home to erect their tent in the attic and go to sleep. Jessica made an elaborate detour, driving the upper hills in Helen’s car so she could secretly smoke. She opened all the windows in the old Volvo. Whenever I went anywhere with Jessica, the most mundane acts suddenly seemed illicit.
“He was the type, though. Typical Jerry, not to have his chains on before the first storm. He was one of those big mountain-guy types, always most comfortable out of town. I think he always thought the woods would protect him. But they figure he died instantly. So that’s something. He was less than a hundred feet from the barn he and his fiancée, Lynne, had just fixed up. Lynne was at home, and, according to Mom anyway, at least an hour must have passed before a car passed by and found the truck upturned.”
We passed Lynne’s barn, where a few lights were on. Jessica flicked an ash out the window. “I never liked that girl. I know things haven’t slid easily for her, but what a moony-eyed dope. You should have seen her in high school, the looks she used to give Dean. Big cow eyes. Really dumb too. Cow eyes and cow hips.”
The things Jessica hated were simple: women who got her brother’s attention, stupidity, and fat. “Good thing Dean found someone in my image,” she said. By which I assume she meant a bitch. It was Jessica’s highest form of praise.
The Congo was pearl white with candles in each window. People filed in in hushed tones. By the side of the vestibule the Jackson family was waiting, held back because Helen insisted we all walk in together as a family. A mother of sons, she knew how a boy jammed his hands in his pockets, the weight of his distraction. The Jackson boys, at church, waited just so, their scarves loosened and parkas unzipped, leaning against the plaques along the sidewall or pacing silently like caged lions. Jessica had always been a single unit until I came along, shy in her way, uncommunicative, without conspirators. Now there were two of us. “Two females” is how Helen referred to us. “We have two females in the family now,” she’d say to her friends, as if she’d been looking at a chromosome readout. Helen knew it was silly at this age to expect it of us, but she nonetheless expected some curveball, some theatrical sort of rebellion. She didn’t know what, but she had heard her friends Nelly and Jan speak for years about the trouble with raising sisters, and so despite our age she kept on her guard. It wasn’t anything she had had experience with. Maybe we would giggle in the sermon, or trip getting into the pew and expose our lingerie to the Congo congregation. She had had only brothers herself, and so she recognized the behavior of her sons, the way they drank milk out of the carton in front of an open fridge, the years of smelly sneakers and sports equipment cluttering up the hallway, the grateful way they ate everything she cooked. Like Jessica, she was used to being the only girl in a family of boys. Her anxious look, as we entered the church, made us both clasp our hands over our coats and walk solemnly, eyes on the floor, following the boys up the aisle to the pew.
At the end of the long aisle, Helen waved and signaled to various people. Raymond leafed slowly through the hymnal open on his lap. Dean sat with his hand in mine; occasionally he scratched one finger lightly against my knuckles. Then the organ began the processional carol, “Adeste Fideles,” and everyone rose. With the music, the small community of people standing in long rows of family joined together temporarily, in honor of the holidays, in song. They sang unevenly, some louder than others, some softly, as if unsure of the tunes. Some spent the time with their heads averted, watching the others. Beneath the complex pattern of wood beams on the church ceiling, the ancient room swelled with their secrets.
“I’m the one married sixty-six years, longer it would be if Lester was still alive, so don’t think I don’t know a few things.”
I sat with Nonnie in the guest room at the top of the stairs, the voile curtain playing against the wall as Helen’s portable floor heater blew warm air into the room. Nonnie was teaching me how to make her Cossack dolls out of knitting wool. Her bony hands worked slowly as she spoke.
“I know this,” she went on. “People are always looking for the answers. There’s only one answer when it comes to marriage. You have got to make it stick.”
It was clear she was practiced at making the little woolen men, her Cossacks, who dangled off the branches of the Jacksons’ Christmas tree each year. She barely looked down at her hands as she worked the yarn.
“There were plenty of times I could have gone off, or Lester, but what were we going to do then? I ask you. Isn’t it all about family? About family sticking together? You know it is. You give out all the pieces of your heart. And then there’s always more to give. This old heart would be long gone now if that wasn’t the truth.”
As Nonnie spoke, she looped a black piece of yarn around the middle of the red to make the first Cossack’s waist sash.
“I remember like it was yesterday,” she told me. “No. Not even. Like it was just this very morning, just today, that I first saw Raymond Jackson, the first time he came a-courting Helen. He was a handsome boy, I’ll tell you, a good looker from the start in that spanking-white US Navy uniform of his. You went weak all over, looking at them in their uniforms in those days. It was summertime, he came to our house in that Navy getup of his, and I knew he was one of the good ones. Good Yankee blood. I thought he understood. But you never really understand the way a man’s mind works, don’t even try. You know that, right?”
She looked up at me. “Listen here, they don’t even understand it themselves,” she said, “most of the time. A woman’s mind is different. Here, hold this for me.” She gave me a ball of red wool and drew a strand of yarn out long. She looped it around her forefinger and thumb. Age spots mottled the fine white skin of Nonnie’s hands, yet her fingernails were long and gleaming. “We all want to pretend it’s equal now. Women and men. Well, it will all be equal in heaven. Down here, a man’s mind is still going to be a different matter no matter what amendments get passed. We have rights, yes, but we’ll never be able to change a man’s brain and whatever’s in there, well, I’m not asking. I’m not pretending to know. A strong woman keeps her own counsel, I always say.”
A whistle blew just then, from downstairs. After a while Jessica appeared in the doorway, in her leotard and leg warmers. She had her hair in a ponytail and a sweatband around her forehead.
“I’m getting ready to start,” she told me. “And you are my pupil.”
Nonnie looked her granddaughter up and down and clicked her tongue. “Well, look at you, Jessica. You don’t have any clothes on.” Then she amended that. “Except socks.”
“Class is starting,” Jessica repeated.
“You go ahead,” I said. “We’re kind of in the middle here.”
“We’re artists at work,” Nonnie said. “You can join in, Jess, if you put some clothes on.”
“I’m off,” Jessica said. “I’m also at work.”
Jessica was teaching a fitness class in San Francisco, and over the holiday she was working on her routine. On most afternoons in the Jackson living room, she and I would prance and stretch amid the furniture and holiday decorations. She shouted instructions and I obediently followed. After, we rested with tea.
Nonnie looked at me after Jessica had gone downstairs. “Such a lovely girl, I don’t know why she wants to look like a skeleton. But here, where was I. Hold that light up, will you, so I can see to get the necktie on this little fellow.”
She took the red yarn and yoked one side with a strand of black. She tied a knot and snipped the extra while I held the gooseneck desk lamp down over her handiwork.
“The important thing,” she went on, “is, even if you could understand a man’s mind? You can never see inside of anyone else’s marriage. Not really. Certain things never show up when you’re on the outside looking in. The wallpaper on the inside, I mean. The fine design.”
The wallpaper on the inside, the fine design. I thought about that. How do we put up the walls that define our marriage; how, over time, do we etch the fine design?
“To be honest,” Nonnie said, “I didn’t see Dean as the type to marry a city girl. Maybe Chris. Chris has an eye for the fancy. He’s the only one of the boys to ever notice my ring. ‘Oh, Nonnie, that’s so beautiful,’ he told me.”
She held up her left hand. The ring she’d worn over sixty years was a narrow gold band, a diamond braced on either side by a small sapphire.
“Chris was only nine when he said that, and already an eye for expensive. My diamond ring. So it will be for Chris when I go, it will be for his girl. But Dean, Dean has always been content with the little things. Yes, that’s why I didn’t really understand why he was so taken with you, to be honest. ‘Oh, she’s a country girl at heart,’ he told me about you, first time he brought you up here to Camden. ‘Trust me.’ But I wasn’t so taken in. There you were with your New York City ways. That tuna salad you made with the French name and the anchovies.”
“Niçoise.”
“And your mother in those fancy leather pants when I first met her—green leather pants! I’d never. I could have sworn they were plastic. They looked like garbage bags. ‘Trust me, Nonnie,’ Dean told me. And like I told you, far be it for me to question what someone else sees on the inside.”
She smiled. “That’s why the pictures I save from weddings are of the table settings. At your wedding, I sent Chris down to take the shot while everyone else was up by the house getting seated before the ceremony began. I always want a shot before anything gets soiled, when it’s all still fresh. To me, your table setting is real art, the pink rosebuds, the gold-rimmed plates. I have the photo on the sideboard in my dining room, right next to the one from Helen and Raymond’s wedding. Maybe you can’t see inside anyone else’s marriage, but a photo of a table setting from a wedding, now that’s the true art, it lasts forever. Okay now. Hold your hand up for me, help make one of these guys with me.”
She looped red yarn back and forth a number of times, between the forefinger and thumb of my right hand. “Hold steady,” she said. “I’m going to put his little belt on now.” She took a strand of black yarn and pulled it tight around the yarn in the middle section between my two fingers.
“So,” she went on, “I’ll tell you something every young married girl like you ought to know. The ‘what if’ principle.” Her voice was at a register barely above a whisper. She leaned in toward me, over the electric heater. “You don’t know what I’m referring to, right?”
“I don’t know, that’s right.”
“Okay so. Did I happen to mention Jacob Fairfax to you ever? No? Never? I thought not. Jacob was a boy who grew up in Westerly, a few streets down from our house. Our families knew each other, from church and whatnot. Jake made a good living, he had taken over his father’s country store when he was just barely twenty. He came to get me for a ride one day when I was just about eighteen. He must have been close to twenty-five when he came calling. My father nearly had a fit—a boy, a young man by that time, coming to get his daughter for a ride in a motorcar. What I remember is his coat, it was a nice brown tweed, and his red mustache. Nothing ever came of it. He deposited me back at home, and I remember my father hollering for a bit. I imagine he had a few salty things to say to Jake Fairfax behind my back because Jake never came back again, he went off into the day and left his memory behind. I was wearing my blue wool hat that day, pale blue like a winter sky. The following year Lester came home from the Great War, and we were engaged soon after that. But whenever I see a blue hat like that one I wore as a girl when I was out on the road with Jake, I think, What if . . . That’s all the cheating I ever did. My memories of Jake Fairfax and the motorcar ride. Just the what-if.”
“The what-if.”
“We all have them, don’t we. The what-ifs.”
“I suppose we do.” I thought of Eliot Andrews, and for a fleeting second, I wondered what he was up to. What if.
“I like to think it’s a purer kind of cheat,” Nonnie said. “The what-if. It grows old with you, keeps close and as fresh as you want it to be. No one can touch it, and no one need know. That’s how we did it in my day, because what would we have done, Lester or me, going off on a hoot with somebody or other. No way to get beyond it after that. So Lester need never to have known that for sixty-six years, the memory of Jake Fairfax in his brown coat with his cranberry mustache was in our bed with us. Sure, a girl’s got to have a little something on the side. Just make sure the side is in the mind. And in the meantime, you make it stick. That’s the only secret to marriage, mark my words. Make it stick.”
Patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.
“I want to say something,” Raymond Jr. said after dinner. We were back in the family room. Chris was playing with the plastic pins on the map above the couch. It was a map of the world. The family stuck pins in every area where one of them had traveled. Each person had a color. Up until recently, Raymond Sr. had been winning with his green pins—all his boat races, cruises over the years, and then European junkets for conferences. Since Dean and I had gotten married, his yellow pins were populating most of Western Europe and bits of Africa, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. There were many struggles among the siblings about this. Chris, who had been to study in Spain, was the most vocal. “Just because you have been there,” he’d say, looking at me but speaking to the group at large, “doesn’t mean Dean qualifies to automatically stick his pins in.”
“But they are a team,” Helen would say. “That’s the point. The marrieds are a team.”
“You and Dad have been married since Christ was born, and you aren’t a team,” Jessica would argue.
“We are a team, honey,” Helen would say. Looking over at her husband in his La-Z-Boy she’d add, “Right?” and nod her head.
“Oh my god, Mom, stop.” Jessica, who was in her favorite spot in front of the woodstove, rolled over on her back. “Stop forcing yourself on the man. I can’t bear to watch it.”
“It hardly matters, Mom hasn’t been anywhere anyway,” Raymond Jr. interjected.
“It’s a dumb game,” Chris added. “Let’s just stop it. Let’s stop it right now.”
The yellow pins came up whenever the Jackson family had guests visit over the holiday. They would ask about my travels.
“I just went as a kid, with my father when I was young.”
“She speaks French,” Helen would point out. “Our city girl has spoken to African tribes.”
“I can’t believe this,” Chris would say. “Mom, get a life.”
The guests were always perplexed. “It’s not necessarily true,” I would say. “My father was there learning Swahili, is all.”
“Is all?” the guests would ask.
“See?” Helen would say. “Swahili! Have you ever?”
“I learned a few words, ‘lion,’ ‘elephant,’ that sort of thing. But it’s not like we were living in the bush or something.” I’d shrug. It all sounded absurd. “We were driving around in a zebra-striped minivan,” I’d add.
“A zebra van! Have you ever?” Helen would insist. “She could have been stampeded by elephants.”
“This is irrelevant,” Jessica would say. “Let’s hear about Alaska for once.” One summer, Jessica had studied with a dance troupe in Anchorage.
“Or Spain,” Chris would put in.
“Elephants can kill,” Helen would go on. “The mothers, to protect their young, they stop at nothing. They did a whole segment on the National Geographic show. Hard to believe, but true.”
Dean had put yellow pins all over East Africa, which was really exaggerating, and South Africa, which was a total lie. I had never been to the South Pacific, but there were yellow pins in Tahiti and Bora-Bora. Some days I thought, What if I just took all my little yellow pins and went home? What if? The little boy in the Masai village still played in my mind from time to time. Tied to a stake outside the family hut, a long rope around his ankle, naked and in tears. Sitting in the Jackson family living room, the wood fire crackling and the frost on the windowpanes, I wondered if that child was still alive and, if so, what he was doing. He’d be a man, with a family of his own, carrying water from the lake across the dusty village in the sun.
“Family powwow time,” Raymond Jr. said. “I have something to say.” He spoke to Chris, “Stop messing with all those pins and sit down.”
Helen reappeared in the doorway with her platter of cookies. By this time in the vacation, the cookies were pretty well picked over. Powdered sugar, shards of grated coconut and crumbs. A few dried rum balls and parts of my whales remained. She looked down. “Oh, dear. Pretty sad showing,” she said.
Helen frowned, looking down at the platter. Then her face brightened. She snapped her fingers. “I know, I’ve got it!”
“Why don’t you make a little fudge?” Dean asked.
“I was going to offer to make some fudge,” she said. “What if I do? Fudge? Kids?”
“Forget it, Mom,” Raymond Jr. said. “I have something to tell you.”
“Sit, Helen,” said Chris. “Take a load off.”
“It’ll take two seconds,” Helen said. “It’s a mix, I just add water and an egg and stir.”
Raymond Jr. looked at his mother. “I think everyone knows what my beef is,” he said.
“I don’t know why everyone in this family has to have a ‘beef,’” said Helen. She sat. “What? What beef, dear?”
“I was born while Dad was in the Navy, right? Right, Mom?”
He waited for his mother to nod. “Yes,” she said. “There I was, all alone. Expecting.”
So excited. Just waiting.
“No, once I was born is what I’m looking at. So here I am, the first baby. Getting all this love and attention, you know? How long, Mom? How long was it just you and me?”
“Three months,” Helen said. “Three months almost to the day.”
“Right. Then he comes home. Suddenly, boom. Mom has no time for me. Then they come along.” Raymond Jr. looked at his siblings. “Boom, boom, boom. Three strikes and I’m out. No one has ever had any time for me. As far as parenting is concerned, I am always the one left out in the cold.”
“Now, Raymond, honey, that’s not how it went,” Helen said.
“See that?” Raymond Jr.’s voice raised. “I don’t even have my own name? They three all got their own names. No, I’m just Raymond the small. Raymond the insignificant. Three months I was Raymond, and then into the shadows I crawled for time immemorial.”
“Raymond, honey,” Helen said.
“Yes, Mom, I remember being in my crib,” Raymond Jr. said.
“This too is horseshit,” said Jessica. “No one remembers being in their crib.”
“I do,” said Raymond Jr. “Highly intelligent people do, it’s proven. I could probably remember getting my diapers changed if I thought hard enough about it.” He tapped his temple.
Jessica rolled over and sat up on the rug. “No one remembers these things, Raymond. It’s you crazy therapists who try to get people to remember things that never even happened.”
“I remember being six,” Chris said. “That’s my earliest memory. I remember my little snowsuit.” He looked to his mother. “The red one?”
Helen smiled. “With the blue piping. You were so cute. A little packet of dimples, you were.”
“A tiny bundle of boy,” Jessica said from her position on the floor. “Little Kiss-Kiss. Chrissy-poo.”
The light off the fire zigzagged across the wall where the competitive map was framed. It zipped shadows across Asia and sparkled on Australia. The Northern Hemisphere burned with the kind of glow reserved for ghost stories around bonfires.
“Let me put this another way,” Raymond Jr. went on. “I was at the salad bar at our local health food store the other day?”
“Is this relevant?” Jessica asked.
“Please. I was standing there, trying to pick the chunks of broccoli out of the pasta salad, when a voice came on the radio. The health food store always plays the talk shows with the science segments. They were discussing the rights of gay couples, but that’s not the point. The point is, the commentator was saying, ‘Does anyone know how to define the word family?’ I put down the tongs and thought, Shit. She’s right.”
Raymond Sr. took off his glasses and started cleaning them with his handkerchief. “I’m getting old. That’s all I know.”
“Daddy’s getting old and I’m getting fat,” Helen said cheerfully.
“And I’m getting exhausted by all this,” said Jessica. “How about that?”
“I am so disappointed in you guys,” said Raymond Jr. He shook his head. “How can you be this way in front of my fiancée?”
“Oh, Ray, please,” Claire said. It was the first she had spoken all night. “Don’t use the word ‘fiancée,’” she said. “It sounds so melodramatic.”
“That’s exactly right,” said Jessica. “That’s just what we are. Nothing more than a cheap WASP melodrama.”
“At least at the movies, they serve popcorn,” said Chris. “I thought I heard someone say something about fudge.”
“That’s it,” said Helen. “Thank you, honey. I’m going to make it right now.”
“Mom,” said Raymond Jr. “Please. Stay.” But she disappeared out the door, a slash of color.
Please. Stay.
On the bottom of the family letter Helen sent prior to the holiday to each of us, on my copy, at the bottom, she had written, “I think I’m lonely.” But at first it didn’t look that way. She was writing in script, the letters close together, and it looked more like, “I think I’m lovely.” One letter changed, and she would go from lonely to lovely. Though both sounded foreign, absurd.
There was only one day left of vacation, and then Raymond would leave along with the rest of us. He had arrived like one of the children too, with a pillowcase of presents and a bag of dirty laundry. She kissed him the way she did her boys, holding his chin in one hand and looking into his eyes. Then she looked away. He had always called her Mother around the kids, but now the irony was not lost on her; it hobbled her. Her children had begun to take on the shapes of strangers, growing into their own lives, coming and going like shadows on the wall that didn’t stay but appeared here and there sporadically and then passed. She couldn’t piece together their various rhythms, the lives they lived without her now. Chris was supposed to be the last bird out of the nest, not her husband.
“I’m bummed out,” Raymond had said to Dean and me that morning when we were having coffee with him in the dining room. “After you guys all split, Mom will be on her own.”
Raymond was learning new words. “Split” was one of them. “Bummed” was another.
“Not our job, Dad,” said Dean.
“Couldn’t you two, at least, stay over for a day or so? Dean, you know Mom counts on you. Please. Stay. It would mean a lot.”
I imagined Helen up in her sewing room off the kitchen, listening to this quiet conversation. To her husband’s low, conspiratorial voice, planning his escape. Please. Stay. It would mean a lot. I thought of Nonnie just then. The way she would clutch Helen’s hand at the dinner table to get her to stop clearing dinner dishes and listen to whatever story she was telling. Please. Stay. I require your full attention.
On the ice it was different. The water in the lake had frozen a deep plum color, almost black. The afternoon sky was clear. Jessica was doing figure eights, carefully balancing on first one foot, then the other. The loops got bigger and bigger; then she’d skate to another part of the lake and start again, first making very small loops, then gradually letting them grow. Her hands were in fists when she concentrated; her eyes never left the ice, set on the thin trails of a pattern she was carving out for herself.
It was the last afternoon of vacation. Chris raced across the lake in pursuit of a hockey puck. He and Raymond Jr. and Dean had been hitting it back and forth. Claire did not want to skate. She sat on a stump near the edge, reading a book, a scarf double-wrapped around her neck and head. It was a welcome present from Helen; she escorted Claire to the yarn store as she had done with me and let her pick out her yarn. Claire chose a reddish-brown rust color Helen called “burnt sienna” that showed off her blonde hair.
Across the ice, the puck raced toward me. I closed my eyes and swung the stick along the surface. It made a scratching sound but missed the puck entirely. “Keep your eyes open,” Dean called. “You can’t hit a dinosaur’s dick with your eyes closed.”
“Yo, Raymond,” Chris called out, having intercepted the wayward puck.
Dean headed left in a fast skid to block Chris’s shot. “Pay attention,” he called out behind him to me. “You’re the only teammate I’ve got out here, sweetheart.”
He missed the block and his brothers scored another goal. From the stump Claire clapped her mittened hands. I lost my balance and fell.
“Oh, sweet jeez,” Dean said, skating over to my side. He raised his hands to make the sign of a T. “Time-out, can I get some backup here? Jessica, get your buns over here.”
But Jessica was concentrating on not being one of the boys, I knew that. Even if her lazy loops were boring her.
“Two on one, then,” Chris said. “C’mon.”
Dean and Raymond Jr. were skating hard, passing the puck back and forth. Their faces went serious when they played. Between shots, they would stand very tall, gliding, taking long breaths; then they’d focus, bend lower, and shoot. Chris made one quick circle around the lake, then joined them.
The game changed. The skating got faster, the shots fiercer; the boys huffed, making clouds with their breath. The sun dropped slowly toward the tip of Mount Battie. The afternoon mottled.
Another car pulled up beside Claire. She looked up from her book and realized it was Raymond. Now all three family cars stood in a row beside the frozen lake. “Oh god,” Dean said. He whistled to his brothers. “Fud alert.”
Raymond moved slowly from the car. He was in his parka, with his hockey skates draped over one shoulder. His car was packed up with all his belongings, the pillowcases full of clean clothes and his new Christmas presents. He had promised Helen he would leave first, before the kids, so she could have one last night alone with us. A game of hockey would be a good way to sign off, he must have decided, rather than do it in front of Helen at home. We all worried what that good-bye might provoke. And no one wanted to be dragged to his new apartment for a housewarming. Even he admitted he didn’t want to make anyone deal with that yet, his brand-new one-bedroom rental in a development just at the base of Mount Battie. We were spared.
In the cold air, Raymond squinted. “You guys doing two on one?” he called out to his sons. “How ’bout a real game?”
“Yeah,” said Dean. “C’mon.”
“Show us what you got, Dad,” Raymond Jr. said. He skated by the rim of the lake, scraping his stick behind him. “C’mon, I’ll take you on.”
At the side of the lake, I unlaced my skates. Jessica joined me. “It’s getting too cold, anyway,” she said. “Let’s get Claire and take a walk around the lake.”
On the stump, Claire shrugged. “I’m game, it’s getting too dark to read anyway.”
In the cold air, the world seemed broad, but the woods hung close. We set off on the path around the lake, the dry branches snapping under our feet.
“It’s almost a mile around,” said Jessica. “So if we do the whole thing, tonight we can have dessert.”
Claire laughed. “I’ve never thought that way in my life,” she said. She had small hands and feet, small hiking boots and red socks. Docile and compact. Jessica wore calf boots with a small heel. She teetered as she walked.
“Appearances,” Jessica said. “It’s all about appearances where I live and work.”
From the ice, we heard a cry, then silence. We headed back to the lake. The boys were in a circle on the ice. Raymond lay below them on his back.
“Holy chili peppers,” said Claire.
“What’d you jerks do?” Jessica asked, wobbling down through the trees in her boots. “Kill Dad?”
“I guess I got him in the forehead pretty good,” Raymond Jr. said. “Puck just went flying.”
“I’m okay, bunny,” Raymond said. He tried to prop his head up.
“He’s fine,” said Dean. “Just a head wound.” Blood was spreading out of the gash on Raymond’s head onto the ice. “Though we’re going to have to take him home to Mom. Here he is with his pillowcase of getaway supplies, and we have to bring the little runaway back home. Won’t she love that.”
Raymond lay on his back on the ice. In the dark, his children were tall shadows above him. They stood with their hands on their hips. Trees. Conquerors. A solid mass of judgment.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Raymond said. “No one worry.”
When we left, the next day, Raymond had returned to his new apartment, his head bandaged and his road ahead uncertain. Helen stood in the driveway outside the family home alone and waved as we turned onto Route 1. She had given him compresses and ice packs and he had left. He was gone.
I think I’m lonely. One letter changed, and I would be lovely. What would that be like?
I’m fine, I’m fine. No one worry.
At the rehearsal dinner under the tent, Raymond’s toast had been the highlight. He had produced a letter Dean had written his parents once, when he was about ten or eleven. Raymond had saved it all these years, he told the group, for this very occasion. Dean’s rehearsal dinner. He held it up for all of us to see, a child’s handwriting on a simple piece of lined paper torn from what appeared to be a school notebook. Dean put his hand to his forehead and shook his head, smiling at his father. Raymond held one of the votive candles up and read it aloud, the candlelight reflecting in his gold-framed glasses. “Dear Family,” the letter said. “I am running away. I broke the window in my room with a baseball and I know you will never forgive me. So I am going to go be on my own now, from now on. I packed a sweater and some potato chips so Mom, you know I’ll be fine. Do not try to come after me. By the time you read this, I will already be gone. It’s better this way. Good-bye forever. Love, your son Dean.” The group erupted in laughter. “He came back by dinner, when he got hungry,” Raymond added. “We all pretended it had just never happened, and no one punished him for the broken window. We knew he cared too much about family to be away too long.” That was his message: Dean cares about family. Dean will be a good husband. As the group applauded, he took the letter, folded it back in its envelope, and showed us the crayoned child’s hand on the outside. “TO MY PARENTS,” it said. “OPEN RIGHT AWAY. IMPORTANT STUFF.” Then he brought it over and made a show of giving it to Dean. The two men embraced. It was then I thought of my own father’s toast, somewhere upstairs in the house among his stacks of papers maybe, his dark room empty as the wind blew off the sea. Such family happiness, I thought, watching Raymond and Dean embrace that night. I’m going to be a part of that family, I’m in that embrace.
Looking at Raymond lying on the ice in the fading winter light, his children standing above him, I thought of his reading of that letter of Dean’s the night before our wedding. Dear family, I am running away. He was leaving. He had done something wrong, something capricious and beyond mending. I know you will never forgive me. Do not try to come after me, for I will be gone. He was running away. Far, far away. It’s better this way. A child’s escape. As far as the simple, bitter promise of freedom could carry him.