Summer 1968
SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH ME. I felt it as soon as Jonathan slowed the rental car and turned left into my parents’ driveway, the twin beams of the headlights making a slow sweep in front of us. My parents had left the front door light on, and in its feeble glow the house loomed up large and solid and unchanged. The sight of it like that enraged me. It should have been burned to the ground or wiped out by a tornado. But the house stood as it always had, as if everything was still the same as it had been when I was a child. I wanted to put my fist through the windshield. Frightened, I clamped my hands together between my legs. I turned around to check on Min in the back seat. She was still asleep, curled up, her head resting on her polka-dotted plastic raincoat.
“She’s okay,” I said to Jonathan.
He glanced at me but said nothing as he inched the car over the crunching gravel and parked by the garage. In the suddenly silent darkness we opened our doors and stood, stretching.
“I’ll carry her in,” he offered.
“No,” I said quickly, “I will.” I knew it was ridiculous, but I was afraid Jonathan might drop her.
The next morning, the call of crows dragged me out of a restless sleep. Sunlight lay hot on my back. The side of my face was pressed into the pillow. I felt paralyzed, unable even to open my eyes. I was still half in my dream: completely alone, treading water in the darkness, afraid of touching something I couldn’t see. I could feel the cold of the water, the fear of slithery seaweed wrapping around my legs.
Wanting reassurance, I reached out my hand and discovered that I was alone in the bed. Jonathan had already gotten up. I opened my eyes and stared at the space in the sheets where he had been. Why hadn’t he woken me? He knew how anxious I was about visiting my parents after all this time. I needed him. Why hadn’t he stayed close by this first morning? Where had he gone?
I rolled over on my back and lay looking at the room I had grown up in: the water stains on the floral wallpaper, the ornate, hand-carved bureau, the holes in the back of the door where my shoe rack had been screwed in. In the far corner, my old Raggedy Ann doll sat propped up on a three-legged stool. Without my glasses, I saw her face as a pale circle, unable to distinguish her eyes or mouth. I had loved that doll when I was very young, dragging her with me everywhere until Andy had come along, better than any doll to hold and then to play with.
Andy. I squinted, trying to make Raggedy Ann’s face come into focus. I knew exactly how long it had been. Four years and eight days. Four goddamn years since you went out sailing knowing a storm was coming in. And before that, almost five months of silence. Not even a letter. And then you died. What was wrong with you? How could you have been so stupid?
Suddenly I was exhausted, flattened by inertia. There was no point in questioning Andy. He couldn’t answer me, no matter how many times I asked him. I closed my eyes, too tired to keep them open. The air in the room was stifling. After his death I had decided not to dwell on the subject of my brother. I lay weighed down in the bed, defeated by gravity.
A crow called again. I heard the flut-flut of wings outside the near window. I opened my eyes. I was still in the family house, built a century before by my great-grandfather. The desk by the near window was still painted a sober gray. A row of my hardcover books was still lined up along the back, against the wall. Everything in the room was the same, practically untouched since I had left for college almost thirteen years before. Each object was familiar, but they seemed to me to be the props of someone else’s childhood. They had nothing to do with me. Lying in the hot sunlight, I stared at the blur of blue and green beyond the far window. It had been a mistake to come back. I tried hard to remember why we had. Min. Of course. We wanted Min to know she had family besides only Jonathan and me. We also wanted my family to know we had succeeded in all the ways they had expected us to fail.
I wondered if Min would like to have Raggedy Ann to keep her company in her room downstairs. Maybe I could bring the books back to Mill Valley for her to read when she got older. She was starting to be curious about my and Jonathan’s pasts. She might want some memento of my own childhood, a means of putting herself into my history. I pictured her sitting cross-legged in the armchair at home, mesmerized by my old illustrated copies of the Dr. Dolittle books. When I had been given them, I had read them straight through, then immediately started over, reading them aloud to Andy.
No, I thought, rolling onto my side, trying to press out the tightness in my chest. Why would Min want some ratty old books, a second-hand doll? I watched a swirl of dust motes orbit each other in a shaft of sunlight. I could smell them, or maybe that was the musty smell of the rug, or the odor of the house itself as it aged and slowly decayed. The remnants of my past would stay behind, I decided, with this house. Min’s childhood belonged to the West Coast, and I belonged there with her.
Eventually I sat up, swinging my feet down to the floor. The green floorboards were mercifully cool. I had no idea what time it was. My head felt thick, balloony, unattached to my body. I reached for my glasses on the night table, blinking as the room took on edges. I found my nightgown still folded at the bottom of my suitcase and pulled it on over my head. In the hallway, the doors to the bedrooms where Robert and his family were staying were all open. I kept my eyes on the hall carpet until I reached the bathroom and pulled the chain for the light over the sink. I couldn’t look into Andy’s old room, afraid of seeing it stripped bare of all his possessions, devoid of his personality. Yet if it had been kept intact, I couldn’t have borne that either.
Back in my bedroom, I dressed quickly, starting to sweat. Another headache was coming on. I was tired of my headaches. They made me want to cry, and I refused to cry. I remembered I’d had headaches the last couple of trips home too. At Andy’s funeral four years before I had thought I would scream from the pressure inside. The rest of my family seemed controlled and contained, greeting mourners after the service graciously. And at Christmas later that year, the last time we had visited, I had left Min and Jonathan to go upstairs and lie down, trying to shut out the family’s voices singing carols below. How could they sing? When Jonathan had come up to find out what was wrong, I told him I had a splitting headache. He said he did too from hearing Andy this and Andy that ever since we had arrived. I understood then that I was right not to have told him about my quarrel with Andy. I remembered that in the months before Andy’s death, Jonathan had never asked me why I didn’t call my brother anymore. Now I didn’t have the headaches so frequently. Jonathan had suggested that I see a doctor, but I didn’t need to. I was getting them under control.
I rummaged through the shorts and blouses in my suitcase for my bottle of Excedrin and swallowed three without water. As I brushed my tangled hair, I glimpsed myself in the mirror above the bureau. Dark streaks had formed under my eyes. I looked pale and unhappy. Jetlag, I thought. That’s why I feel so rotten. All I need are a few days by the pool. I tied my hair back with an elastic band and escaped the airless room.
Coming down the creaking, narrow stairs, I breathed in the welcome odor of fresh-ground coffee. The piercing shrieks of children’s voices came from the dining room, making me wince. It seemed to me there had always been children yelling somewhere in the house; admittedly, I had been one of them, though the older I had grown, the more I had wanted to find a quiet place to be alone. I wondered again where Jonathan was. I had wanted to come down to breakfast with him, collecting Min on the way, the three of us entering the dining room together. What could he have thought was more important? In the hall I opened the door to the small room Min was staying in, which my mother still called the maid’s room though it had been a storage closet during my entire lifetime. The bed was empty. The sheet and light blanket were neatly pulled up to cover the pillow. Her book, Harold and the Purple Crayon, was lying open on a chair beside the bed, waiting for her.
I found my daughter sitting quietly at the dining room table with her three noisy cousins and Nora, my sister-in-law. Through the French doors behind her I could see the gnarled, bushy trees in the orchard spaced evenly up the slope of the field. Min’s juice glass was almost empty, perched on the tablecloth in front of her. I knew she wanted more but was too shy to ask. As soon as she saw me, she slipped down from her chair and came over, putting her hand in mine and turning back to the table with a look of satisfaction. She’s on equal footing with her cousins now, I thought; her mother is here too. Nora’s three weren’t paying much attention. The youngest, Gerard, was kicking his sister under the table, and she was in turn hitting him on the arm with her fist. “You’re a pest,” she informed him.
I felt a tug on my hand. I looked down at Min’s upturned face. Her hair stuck out on one side instead of falling neatly in straight bangs and past her ears as it usually did. She had put her red- and yellow-striped shorts on backwards, but otherwise she had managed to dress herself in the clothes I had laid out the night before. I let go of her hand and crouched down in front of her. Wetting my fingertips on my tongue, I started to smooth down the strands of her hair. Immediately she grabbed my hand away from her head. “Mommy,” she said sternly.
“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the air to show I was giving up.
I heard my name being called. At the table, Nora and I exchanged kisses, smiling the wide smiles of in-laws who have a vague fondness for each other. She asked her children if they remembered me. Only Trish, who must have been almost ten, managed a doubtful yes. Min had sidled up behind me and stood close by, near Trish’s chair. She seemed fascinated by the older girl’s long blonde braid.
Trish twisted around, her hands clutching the back of her chair. “My mother says you came from Korea. That’s next to China. People talk funny there.”
“Why?” Min asked.
“I don’t know,” Trish shrugged. “Say something in your language.”
“English is Min’s language,” I snapped. I was seething. “She’s as American as you are. She’s my daughter.” You’re wrong, Andy, I added in my head, Min is as much my child as Nora’s kids are hers. I was afraid Trish would contradict me, or worse, her mother would, but instead they stared at me, a little stunned, it seemed, by my vehemence.
“No one said she wasn’t American,” Nora told me.
You have to accept her, I thought. But the argument wasn’t over. How could it be?
I said, “Trish seems to believe that my daughter is foreign.”
“Oh, Catherine, Trish is only ten years old, she doesn’t understand that you adopted Min before she learned to talk.”
“Maybe you should have told her.”
I turned back to my daughter. The two girls were exchanging a long stare. I took her hand again. “Let’s go get more orange juice,” I said gently, reaching for her glass on the table. My fury had passed. Min’s gaze lingered on Trish as we moved away.
My mother was in the kitchen standing at the stove, her apron tied over her cotton skirt. She poured beaten eggs into a pan. Bacon sizzled and popped in another. The anticipation of its salty chewiness made my mouth water. In the strong summer light, I could see the gray sprinkled in her short, wavy brown hair. The skin on her face was beginning to sag around her pale blue eyes and her chin. I felt as though I had never stood this close to my mother before; in the three and a half years I had been away, she had grown old, and I couldn’t remember what she had looked like young.
She glanced down at Min, then up at me standing beside her. “Min was up early,” she said, sliding her spatula through the liquid eggs. My daughter was peering up at the collection of antique kitchen utensils hanging from pegs on the wall above the stove. “When I came down, she was outside on the patio studying the insect population between the flagstones.”
“Weren’t you sleepy this morning?” I asked Min. She looked up at me, her large black eyes very solemn, and shook her head. She didn’t like to speak around people she didn’t know. I hoped that within five days, by the end of our trip, she would be as voluble as she usually was at home. I wanted her to like my side of the family, even if I had my own mixed feelings about them. I wanted her to enjoy this visit, even if I couldn’t.
“Where’s Jonathan?” I asked my mother.
“He went with Robert and your father down to the stream to go over the plans for the new house. Coffee’s ready,” my mother added, nodding her head toward the percolator on a back burner.
“The new house?” I asked, confused. “What do you need—”
“Ask Nora if she’d like a cup, will you?”
“Nora, coffee’s ready,” I called into the dining room.
“Thanks,” she called back.
My mother scowled at me. One of the rules in the house had always been no shouting between rooms. Before she could say anything, I filled Min’s juice glass and gave it back to my daughter. She took it in both hands. I knelt to retie her sneaker, pulling one long lace from under her slight weight. “There. Now I’ll get coffee, and I’ll meet you back at the table.” She nodded. “Min?” I looked into her face, concerned. I hadn’t seen her beautiful smile all morning. “Do you want to smile for your mommy?”
“I don’t feel like it,” she said seriously, lifting her chin a little. I watched her until she shuffled through the kitchen door, taking small sips from her full glass.
Behind me my mother flipped the bacon and put bread in the toaster, brisk and efficient. I stood up, wanting coffee, wanting my headache to go away. Already this day was not going well. My mother moved past me toward the ice box, not looking up as I stepped back out of her way. We were alone together for the first time in almost four years, and neither one of us had anything to say. The odd thing, I realized, was how normal this seemed to me. I took a mug out of the cabinet. It said “LOVE” in big, loopy, brightly colored letters. Above that, a flower bloomed into a woman’s face. I bet Susie gave this to them, I thought, she’s a big Peter Max fan. I couldn’t imagine them choosing it for themselves. The vibrant colors and the exuberance of the lettering reminded me of the crayon drawings and finger paintings that I, and then Andy, and then Susie, had brought home from school. My mother had always reacted the same way, glancing at them once and saying, “Put it away now, it’s time for your nap.”
I poured steaming coffee from the pot and drank it black, holding the mug between both hands the way Min had. As I stood at the counter looking outside over the valley at the distant hills, I remembered Jonathan telling me the night before, as we were undressing for bed, that he and Robert and my father would be getting up early to walk out the boundaries of a second, smaller house my father had gotten it into his head to build. I had been too exhausted to register what he was saying. I gulped down the coffee and poured some more. I could imagine them down at the stream measuring out their long strides, thrusting sticks into the yielding ground. They would look thoughtful as they stretched a measuring tape along the perimeter, one calling out the numbers, another nodding and jotting them down. Min would have enjoyed the expedition. She might have counted out the lengths of her own feet, putting heel to toe, balancing herself with outstretched arms. She might have learned something about the importance of taking measurements or why it was always men who were expected to do these jobs. Why hadn’t Jonathan insisted Min come along, since she was already up? My father might have listened to Jonathan.
“Where is Susie?” my mother complained. “She promised me she would arrive by breakfast.”
“She probably forgot to set her alarm,” I answered.
My mother frowned at me, as if Susie’s tardiness were my fault, then turned back to the stove. “By the way, your father and I are going on a cruise to the Caribbean this winter.”
“That’ll be nice,” I said. Before I could stop it, the image of Andy’s hand slipping from the capsized sailboat, his head sinking below the choppy ocean waves, was so clear it was as if I had been there witnessing him drown. I blinked, opening my eyes to the scrubbed white walls of my mother’s kitchen. I stared at her lined face, refusing to think about something that wasn’t real. There was no point. I would not think of Andy during this visit, even here where my memories of him were strongest. Turning her back to me, my mother opened the silverware drawer and counted out forks and knives. Without thinking I reached out and rested my hand on her shoulder. She startled at my touch, whirling around.
“Goodness, Catherine. Here, take these out to the table.” She dumped the collection of silver into my hands and went back to her cooking.
In the dining room, Gerard was showing Min a scab on his leg. They inspected it together, heads bent, touching its edges. I laid out the place settings. The two children started counting their bug bites, giggling. She was making a friend. I was relieved. Then I looked up and saw my brother Robert on the lawn striding toward the patio, his face eager. He can’t wait to burst in and tell us one of his long-winded stories, I thought. I returned to the kitchen to help my mother soak some of the grease from the bacon with paper towels and pull a heavy stack of plates from the cupboard. I knew I was hiding, but I didn’t care.
Through the window above the sink I watched my father and my husband as they climbed up the hill toward the house, my father with some effort. His legs were spindly and pale, as if this were the first day all summer that he had worn shorts. Otherwise he looked younger than a man of fifty-six. His hair was still thick and dark, his posture very erect. Jonathan kept up easily as he described something, blocking off portions of the air in front of him with his hands. Beside my father, Jonathan looked short and stocky, almost pudgy. His hair was the longest it had ever been, and he had grown a beard in the last few months, which I liked. It made him appear a little dangerous, a little unpredictable. It reminded me of how he had been when I fell in love with him.
When I met Jonathan, I had wanted to get as far away from my parents as I possibly could. I wanted to get married, but not to the sort of man they had in mind for me. I wanted to live unconventionally. Jonathan had been a radical—to the degree that such a thing was possible in 1958—when I met him during my junior year of college. He was a Democrat, and he had never finished college, both of which made him unsuitable in my parents’ eyes. He rarely spoke to his own family and was curt to the point of rudeness with mine. Secretly, I was delighted. I believed he could offer me the two things I had been looking for my entire life: freedom and adventure.
But in time Jonathan had grown to like my family, my parents most of all. After our move to California, we would fly back east and spend long weekends with them. He said he felt embraced in a way he had never felt wanted by his own mother and father. He enjoyed their esoteric discussions during which no one yelled at anyone else, and he liked what he viewed as their permissiveness. He couldn’t recognize that they were actually indifferent, at least to everything that mattered. He didn’t see how they demanded polite behavior over honesty. He admired them for everything I did not. I tried to explain how often, growing up, I had sat at the dining table hoping that my father or mother would focus on me for a short time, ask me about school or my friends, recognize something clever I had said. We had all wanted that. Robert had received it to some extent, being the favored child. But mostly my parents existed in a world of their own, speaking to each other about things we knew nothing about and expecting us to either listen or conduct our own separate, intelligent conversation. I finally realized that Jonathan had been won over by my parents. This outraged me; it was the last thing I had bargained for when I married him.
I watched my husband and my father pace across the lawn, deep in conversation. They glanced at each other, smiling and nodding in agreement. My whole life I had yearned to talk with my father with that much engagement, that much passion. I carried the platter of bacon into the dining room and set it down in the middle of the table. Porter and Gerard immediately grabbed for it. Min watched us all. From across the table I caught her eye and smiled at her. She flashed me a lightning-quick grin, then it vanished and her gaze passed on to Robert.
When they came inside and joined us, my father nodded at me and sat in his chair at the head of the table. Jonathan kissed me on the forehead. I was relieved to have him back. But I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t temporary. After an absence of three and a half years, we hadn’t even been here a day and he had gone over to the other side. I pulled him toward me, an arm around his waist, breathing in his familiar aftershave and the piney scent his clothes had picked up.
After the meal, Nora and my mother cleared the dishes while Nora’s kids scuttled out of the house, racing each other down the hill. Jonathan asked Min if she’d like to go with them, but she shook her head.
“Shall we all take a walk?” he asked, standing up and pushing his chair against the table. He spoke loudly enough to include my father in his invitation. “Min, I know you want to see the pool.”
Min looked up at me. “Mommy, can we, please?”
I watched my father leave the room, apparently not much interested in spending time with us, his daughter and granddaughter. I heard the front door close. “Why don’t you go?” I said to Jonathan. Min and he came around the table, and I stroked his arm, catching his hand in mine. “I’ll find you. I want to say hello to Pop.”
“Sure.” He squeezed my hand.
I leaned down to Min. “Let’s both spend a little time with our dads, okay?”
“And I want to go to the apple tree you climbed on,” she added.
I imagined Min straddling one of the crooked branches up in the old tree, inching her way along it. Then I saw the branch break and my daughter tumble out, falling head first onto the hard ground. I can’t keep her safe, I thought, my heart clutching then starting off again twice as fast. As hard as I try to protect her from harm, she’ll be on the brink of disaster every minute. Anything can happen.
“Don’t let her climb it,” I told Jonathan, gripping his hand tightly. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It wasn’t when you did it.” He pulled his hand out of mine.
I looked hard at him. “No, I mean it. Don’t let her leave the ground.” He stared at me as if I were crazy. I felt crazy. Something was wrong with me, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Please, Jonathan.”
“It’ll be okay, Catherine. Calm down. We’ll see you later.” He turned from me. I stared after him. Why didn’t he understand? I myself didn’t understand this sudden terror, but the feeling was real, and strong. Why couldn’t he see that and accept it? Why did he always have to contradict me? As they moved away, Min turned back and waved.
My father was standing on the front steps with his hands in the pockets of his Bermuda shorts fiddling with some change. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his sneakered feet. I stood beside him, sipping my coffee, looking out at the hills across from us. The area bordering our land was part of a state park, so there was no danger of it ever being developed. We had an uninterrupted view of leafy green maples and elms, a field overgrown with grass turned beige from lack of rain, and the pure blue sky overhead. There was no breeze. I could feel a trickle of sweat drip down my side.
My father had never been a talkative man. We stood for a while in silence, listening to the call of a mourning dove. A chipmunk ran across the lawn. As our silence wore on, I became aware of how acutely I still wanted to be close to him. I hoped he would tell me something about himself that could be between us alone. Maybe he had made a small breakthrough at the pharmaceutical lab where he worked. I had always admired my father’s intelligence and perseverance. For a time, I had hoped to grow up to be like him, until I discovered that I disagreed with almost everything he believed in. Maybe he would ask me about something I cared about, showing me that he knew what that might be. I drank my coffee and tried to think of how to start such a conversation.
“Have you seen the garden?” he asked, turning to me.
Gratitude flared up in me for this small invitation into his life. Perhaps this was a turning point. I remembered how attentively he had listened to Jonathan as they climbed the hill earlier.
“No, I’d love to. You know, we just got here last night, Pop,” I reminded him playfully.
He stepped onto the grass and began walking around the side of the house. Left behind, I put my coffee cup down on the top step and ran after him. Then, annoyed with myself, I slowed down to a walk. I breathed in the sweet scent of the freshly mown grass, a smell I missed in Mill Valley.
My parents’ garden was a special project that they had worked on together for the past fifteen years, when one by one we had started to leave home for college. During the week my mother kept it watered while my father commuted from Poughkeepsie to his lab in the city; on weekends they weeded and checked for pests. I remembered winter nights when they would pore over seed catalogues, discussing in meticulous detail the quality of various strains of beets and melons. They managed to produce most of the vegetables they ate over the summer, and my mother canned the remainder. They used raised beds and covered the plants with a light, semi-transparent cloth instead of spraying them.
I fingered a fat, wrinkled leaf from a plant that was heavy with both green and red tomatoes, held up by a stake tied to the stem. I could smell the soil and the thin, bitter odor of the plant itself. Reaching out, I pulled a ripe tomato from the stem and bit into it. Its sweet, acidic juice filled my mouth. I ate it greedily, the juice spilling onto my hand.
“We’ve been having them every night in salads,” my father informed me. “The lettuce is ours too.” He pointed it out several rows down, pale green beside a line of darker skinny plants.
“Onions?” I guessed, feeling absurdly hopeful.
He nodded. “And string beans, cucumbers, carrots, potatoes,” he said, walking down the beds. He bent over and pulled the leaves of one bushy plant aside, inspecting, then checked the next plant over. Straightening, he said, “Come see the flowers,” then turned and walked around the corner of the house toward the patio.
These were less well cared for, for some reason, growing in unruly clusters along the low stone wall that edged the patio. Most of them were wildflowers. It looked as though the soil hadn’t been weeded all summer or the flowers cut back. That didn’t seem to matter; the bed was a wild, beautiful profusion of color.
The night before, after Jonathan and I had climbed up to our room, weary and a little disoriented, I had been touched to find violet stonecrop and blue sweet William arranged in a vase on the bureau. My parents didn’t usually pick their flowers for the house. I asked my father, “Was it you who put the flowers in our room?”
“Flowers? I think Nora was asking about vases after dinner.”
My father pulled a few weeds and threw them on the grass behind him. I looked up at the house, shading my eyes from the sun. The dark red wood and white trim had faded and was peeling in places. “Time for a paint job,” I said.
My father looked up, appraising the house. “Yes, I’ve been putting it off. Maybe I’ll get Robert to help me with it this weekend. Or Jonathan, if he’s looking for some good, solid physical labor.”
“I could help you, Pop,” I ventured.
He shook his head, still gazing up at the house thoughtfully. “I don’t think so, Cathy. I want it done right.”
I stared, stunned, at the side of his face. Then I was furious, thinking that I would know how to paint houses and measure out foundations if he had taught me along with Robert and Andy. But there was no point in getting angry at him. He would only tell me he didn’t appreciate my tone of voice. It would never occur to him that he had hurt me. I said simply, “I’d like to help you, Pop.”
“Why don’t you go take a swim with the others,” my father suggested as he stepped onto the patio and opened the screen door. “I’ve got some things to take care of this morning.”
After he had gone inside, I stood where I was, too dazed to move. Then I wandered along the flowerbed and picked a small bouquet of orange marigolds for Min. I am thirty-one years old, I reminded myself. I have a husband and a daughter and a full life independent of my father. But at that moment I couldn’t make them real to myself. There was only me and my father, and he was implacable. Walking back past the vegetable garden, I rolled the ruffled petals of the marigolds against my cheek, breathing in the flowers’ sturdy scent.
I rounded the corner of the house and stopped. On the front lawn Jonathan stood holding Min in his arms, her short legs hanging down on either side of him, his hands making a seat beneath her bottom. Her arms were draped around his neck. She put her face very close to his as she spoke, her fine black hair brushing his forehead. It looked like a lovers’ private conversation. Immediately I felt excluded. Min never confided in me, whispering in my ear. With me her declarations were always blunt, straightforward. I drew back to watch my husband and my daughter whispering on the lawn. Both of them were too absorbed in each other to notice me anyway.
Eventually Min pulled her upper body back. She put one fist to her mouth and extended the other one out and back to the first. “Bom, bom, bom, bom,” she sang.
“What instrument is that, Min?” Jonathan asked her.
Min ignored him and kept on playing, tilting her face up to the sky. Her hair fell away from her neck.
“What instrument are you playing, Min?” Jonathan jiggled her a little to get her attention.
“The tuba.”
“Nope. The trombone.”
Min wound her arms around her father’s neck, singing her simple melody to him as though there was nobody else in the world.
“How does the trombone look, Min?” Jonathan asked her. Immediately her hands went up to imitate it again.
“And what does the tuba look like?”
“It’s big,” she answered.
“What does it sound like?” Silence. “Does it have a low sound?”
Min started singing in a high voice, smiling at her father.
“And what does a trumpet sound like?” Jonathan persisted.
“Daddy, let’s sing some more,” Min said, pulling on Jonathan’s beard, making him smile.
“Anything you want, sweetheart. You’re my little girl.”
“I love you best of all, Daddy.” She hugged him tightly around the neck. Then they began singing, her high trombone voice and his low tuba voice in unison, bom, bom, bom, bom.
I turned away from them and walked around the side of the house again to the back door. I felt dizzy and afraid, my heart beating hard in my body. Jonathan had always been a very loving father to Min. He was the playful, indulgent parent, the one who came home from his office and provided the gift, the magic, the special surprise. Of course she would say she loved her father best. I was always with her, feeding and washing and caring for her. I was the one who made the rules, who told her no and sometimes made her angry. I knew I could be over-protective as a mother. I had no right to expect Min to return the passion I felt for her. But inside I felt ripped apart, shredded like a flimsy cloth torn in two. I lived for her. I couldn’t bear to think that anyone—even Jonathan—might be closer to her than I was.
In the stream that ran at the bottom of the hill below the house, a series of stepping stones crossed a calm pool of water. They were flat and fairly evenly spaced, yet it only occurred to me for the first time as I walked from one to the next that they had been put in place by hand, probably by my grandfather or his father. The stream ran clear and wide and shallow, bounded by woods on both sides. As a teenager I had spent hours sitting by its shore, watching the water move unhurriedly downstream. I remembered admiring how it bent around rocks or fallen tree branches, the way flames did but without burning them up. I had wanted to grow into a life that was more like water and less like fire, where being near others was soothing rather than searing. I remembered too finding the stream’s quiet gurgle a relief from the constant calling of human voices up at the house. I would bring a book with me to read, propping myself against the wide trunk of a tree.
On the far shore, I followed alongside the brook. Occasionally I grazed past the underbrush, brambles scratching my legs. The sun was now directly overhead, beating through the leafy trees, creating a dappled effect on the surface of the water. A mosquito hummed near my head. The earth smelled cool and damp. I was trying to think of nothing, to empty myself of words and faces and feelings until all that remained was the sun’s heat on my skin and the stream’s constant babble like chimes on a breezy day.
Small dark fish darted around in the water. I didn’t know what they were called. I crouched down to watch them flicking their tails, changing direction. I watched for a long time, then I stood and walked again. Eventually I found the clearing on the other side of the stream where my father wanted to build his guest house, marked by stakes in the ground and a string running in a rectangle between them. I moved on, not thinking, just walking, listening, watching.
I was hungry when I climbed the hill back to the house. In the kitchen the dishes from lunch lay soaking in the sink. I wondered if my mother had made some disapproving remark about my absence when they sat down to eat. I wondered if they had missed me. The house was quiet; my parents were most likely resting in their room. I didn’t know where everybody else was. They had probably driven off after lunch to play tennis at the club, bringing the children along as ballboys. I took a large bowl of potato salad out of the ice box and picked at it with a fork from the sink. There were a few bologna slices left from the kids’ sandwiches. I unwrapped them from their waxed paper, put a little potato salad inside, rolled them up, and ate them. Then I went upstairs to change into my bathing suit.
Jonathan and Min and my niece and nephews were in the water when I arrived at the pool. The children were taking turns diving from the deep end and swimming underwater to the other side. Jonathan stood in the shallow end, crouched down, making shapes with his body for the children to swim through. I smiled, watching them, enjoying their enjoyment. Whatever it was I had been going through earlier had dissipated entirely, and I was relieved. All I had needed was a quiet walk.
“Hi,” Jonathan said as I sat down on a folding lawn chair and arranged my towel, suntan lotion, and book beside me. “Where’ve you been? We looked for you. You disappeared.”
“I’m sorry, Jonathan. I guess I needed some time alone.” I unscrewed the top from the tube of Bain de Soleil, squeezed a dollop onto my palm, and began to rub it into my legs. “I went down to the stream.” I was even starting to feel good, stretched out in the sun, not having to go anywhere. I had everything under control now.
Porter popped up from underwater, shaking the wet hair from his face like a puppy. “Betchya can’t catch me!” he yelled, splashing Jonathan and ducking underwater again.
The other children shouted, “You’re it! You’re it!” and swam as hard as they could away from Jonathan, who splashed back to give them time, then dove after them. I took off my glasses to dab lotion on my cheeks and smooth it in, then leaned back, closing my eyes. Everything was all right.
Not long after, my sister Susie showed up at the pool with Robert and Nora. She wore baby-blue hot pants and a scoop-necked t-shirt, and her hair fell past her waist, all of which made her look even younger than she already was. She came over and crouched to kiss my cheek. “How are you?” she asked, her sunglasses mirroring my face in two dark ovals.
“Fine. Have you seen Mom? She expected you for breakfast this morning.”
“Yeah.” Susie grinned. “She’s a trip. ‘When you tell me you’ll be here by ten, I expect you to be here by ten.’” Susie’s imitation was perfect.
I had to admire my little sister. She truly didn’t care what our parents thought of her. “How long are you here for?” I asked.
“The long weekend. I have a date Monday night.”
“Oh? Someone serious?”
She laughed. “Nah. A friend. We just ball, he brings dope. Hey, where’s Min?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her for ages.”
I nodded toward the pool, where my daughter swam clumsily but energetically after Trish, trying to tag her. Jonathan shepherded them toward the steps, then hoisted himself out of the water. He padded over the hot cement, dripping, to offer Susie a kiss. “Good to see you, Susie.”
“You too, Jonathan.”
Jonathan sat down with Robert and Nora on the grass, stretching out his legs and propping himself back on his elbows. Nora lit another cigarette. Her kids went running off back to the house, passing my father, who had appeared behind us and stood with his hands in his shorts’ pockets, surveying us all. When Jonathan waved him over, my father pulled up a lawn chair beside him.
Susie sat down on the cement next to Min and helped her towel dry. “Do you remember me? I’m your Aunt Susie. I’m your mom’s sister.”
Min smiled at her shyly.
“I can tell you’re going to be a strong swimmer, Min.”
“How do you know?” Min asked, squinting up at her.
“Because you dig the water so much. You can already swim in the deep end.”
“I can dive too. You want to see?” Min stood up, ready to jump back into the water.
“Yeah, but let me go in first. We have a rule here. It’s the only one you should never break. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“That’s the first word. No children allowed in the pool alone. It’s a good rule too, because we don’t want you to get hurt.” Susie stood up, took a few steps toward the water, and dove in.
My father leaned forward, frowning. “Susie!” he barked at my sister when her dark head reappeared above the water, the ends of her hair trailing on the surface. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re in shorts.”
Susie floated on her back, fanning gently with her hands. Her nipples hardened beneath her light t-shirt. Embarrassed, I looked over at the others. Robert and Nora were pretending to have a conversation. Jonathan looked at my sister’s breasts outlined behind the wet fabric of her shirt, then at my father. Min stood near the edge of the pool, watching me uncertainly, scratching her leg. I smiled at her. She turned back toward my sister.
“I forgot to bring my bathing suit, Pop, all right?” Susie let her legs drop, treading water. “I’m ready, Min. Let’s see you dive.”
But my father wouldn’t let it go. “You could have borrowed a bathing suit from your sister or your mother. A t-shirt is not appropriate. As you well know.”
“My God, Pop, I’m just swimming. Don’t hit the panic button.” Then she turned her head and said in a gentler voice, “Come on, Min. It’s okay.”
My father grunted and stood up, starting back to the house, his posture as upright as ever. Min looked quickly at me. I nodded at her encouragingly. “Go on.”
I could never have spoken to my father the way Susie had, dismissing his concerns so easily, as if they didn’t matter. Sometimes I felt Susie and I were from completely different generations. I had been raised in an era that stressed respect for one’s parents, regular attendance at church, loyalty to one’s government: deference to authority in general. My family was contented with its hard-earned affluence and wanted only to remain that way. During my childhood, politics rarely moved beyond the public debate; when I was in college, except for the first sit-ins in the South, civil disobedience was unnecessary, unthinkable. The best I could do was move far enough away in order to live as I wanted, work steadily toward social justice, and raise Min. But now even that wasn’t enough. The nation was being torn apart by violence. In the spring, watching the nightly news, Jonathan and I had seen city after city erupt in riots and flames for weeks after King was killed. We were saddened, and not only by his death. It seemed to us the last hope for peaceful integration had been snuffed out; the Black Panthers would push their militant agenda now, and whites and blacks would be at each other’s throats. And while the paper reported almost daily another anti-war protest on a college campus or in Washington, complete with arrests and injuries, the war in Vietnam dragged on. Two nights before coming east, we had stood horrified in front of the TV set watching the Chicago police bludgeon protesters in a haze of tear gas outside the Democratic National Convention. I envied those people their willingness to risk their lives, but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I cared too much about the consequences of my actions. What was happening all over the country was exhilarating, and it was frightening, and it was significant, and without even trying Susie was part of it in a way I could never be. Watching my little sister stroke languidly through the water in her clothes, unconcerned, I felt cheated. I had been born years too early.
Min went to the deep end of the pool and backed up a few steps. Then she ran with her arms held out ahead of her and hurled herself into the water head first.
At dinner the conversation eventually turned to the assassinations earlier in the year. My parents didn’t seem particularly interested; in fact, I felt they were almost relieved by the deaths of King and Kennedy, though they didn’t say so. Jonathan was brilliant contending with them from his vast store of facts and his certainty. But it was clear by the end of the meal that he hadn’t changed anyone’s mind.
We moved into the large, comfortable living room, where my father poured us glasses of Drambuie from the bar. This had always been my favorite room in the house. It had a low wood beam ceiling and several window seats and sofas piled with throw pillows. The lamps cast a warm yellow light. We broke into smaller groups, Robert and Nora’s children playing Parcheesi on the rug, the men smoking cigars in one corner, while Susie, Nora, my mother, and I sat near the fireplace. Min wanted to stay near me rather than play with the other children. She settled sleepily in my lap, her curled body warm and familiar. Nora opened her pocketbook and took out her cigarettes and silver lighter. She tapped out a cigarette, bent her head over the lighter’s flame.
“Jonathan’s very passionate about his beliefs, isn’t he?” Nora asked me, blowing a stream of smoke into the air above her. “I mean, I care about civil rights and everything, but don’t you think Dr. King was asking for too much?”
Susie looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I could tell Nora had been holding this thought inside her ever since the subject came up, but she had been afraid to express it at the dining table. She assumed that because my husband was out of earshot, she could voice it now.
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” I told my sister-in-law. “I happen to agree with Jonathan. If white people in this country could get it through their heads that equal rights can never be ‘too much,’ then we might start to make some progress.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you, Catherine,” Nora replied. “I was upset too when I heard he’d been shot. But most people thought he was getting hard to handle. He would have been assassinated at some point anyway. It was just a matter of when.”
“Are you saying he deserved to die? He should have known when to shut up because whites were getting tired of the uppity nigger?”
“Oh, Catherine, you’re being extreme,” my mother said. She put her glass on the side table next to the sofa and crossed one leg over the other, smoothing the light material of her dress. I glanced down at Min. She was already asleep. “I think you and Nora are essentially in agreement,” my mother continued. “You just have to realize that progress takes a long time. I don’t think Negroes are ready for the changes King wanted for them. Maybe they themselves don’t want to be brought forward so fast. They certainly aren’t acting very responsibly with all the freedoms they’ve already been given.”
Susie seemed distracted. She was going to be no help at all. “That’s ridiculous,” I began.
Susie interrupted. “Mom, what would you say if one weekend I brought a black boyfriend to visit?”
Our mother visibly stiffened. “Are you dating a Negro, Susan?”
“The term is ‘black.’” Susie shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
I stared at my sister. Was the lover she had mentioned to me earlier a black man?
“Well, what’s the hassle?” Susie asked my mother. “There’s already one minority person in the family.”
“That’s different,” my mother said, looking away. “Min is Oriental. It’s not the same thing at all.”
I felt caught up short, as though someone had punched me in the stomach. “Why does everyone keep harping on Min’s race?” I demanded, furious. “Why does anyone care? It’s not important. Can’t you see that?” Can’t you see, Andy? She belongs here. It doesn’t matter what she looks like.
The three of them stared at me. I stared back. I was so enraged I was barely aware of what I had said. My hand trembling, I finished off my drink and put the glass down on the arm of my chair. In her sleep, Min shifted a little. I held her to me securely.
“You’re so uptight sometimes,” Susie said after a silence.
“I am not,” I insisted. “I get angry when defenseless people get picked on.”
“You do always stick up for the underdog, don’t you?” Susie commented, as if she had just understood this about me.
“Don’t you?” I asked, and then I realized that Susie wasn’t actually interested in political change. She simply ignored what she didn’t like.
She shook her head. “No, not always. But you’ve got an argument for everything. The only person you never seemed to fight with was Andy. I don’t know why not. He could be such a freak. Remember when he stole my diary? Maybe you were at Smith by then. He took it to school and read it to his friends. It took me months to forgive him.”
I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if a hand had gripped my heart and squeezed. I was afraid I might black out. I wanted to leave the room, but I couldn’t move. I looked away from Susie. I didn’t say anything.
“I remember,” my mother chimed in, “how as a little girl you used to defend both Susie and Andy when you thought they were being unfairly punished.” She turned to Nora. “I’ll never forget when Andy brought home a few fish from the stream in a jar that he kept hidden in his room. When they died, Douglas was furious at Andy for bringing them into the house in the first place. Catherine argued with her father that Andy didn’t know any better.”
Astonished, I listened as though I didn’t know this story. My mother had never been someone who reminisced about the past. She had always been impatient, telling us to put aside what was over and move ahead. It occurred to me that maybe Andy’s death had changed her. I didn’t know what to do with that possibility.
“How old was Andy?” Nora asked.
“Six or seven. You see, he had wanted a pet and his father wouldn’t allow it. Catherine argued that it was Andy’s way of solving the problem. Now that the fish were dead, she told her father, he didn’t have to make it worse by scolding Andy.” She turned to me. “Although I think the word you used was ‘berating.’”
As my mother spoke, I remembered Andy holding the jar of stagnant water, the fish floating unmoving on the surface. By the time my father had finished, Andy’s mouth was trembling from trying to keep back tears. The painful tightness in my chest wasn’t letting up. I blinked, slightly dizzy. I felt myself receding, so that I watched my mother and sister and sister-in-law sitting together in the warm, lighted room from a great distance.
I said, “I have to put Min to bed. It’s getting late.” I looked down at my daughter. Her mouth was beginning to fall open. I saw her stubby black eyelashes resting on the tender, slightly clammy skin of her cheeks. I felt a stab of sympathy for her, for the bewildered helplessness of children. I thought, She’s your niece. Why couldn’t you see how beautiful she is? I sat gazing at my sleeping child, feeling unreal, feverish, feeling so far away from that room that I could have been asleep myself.
“You never want to talk about him,” Susie said. Startled, I looked up at her. Nora stubbed out her cigarette, stood up, and went to sit on the rug with her children, folding her legs beneath her. “Whenever I bring him up, you change the subject,” Susie went on. “It’s been four years. He was our brother. Can’t we remember him together?”
I wanted to be able to talk with her, but how could we? No one in my family ever said what they felt. I could see how remembering Andy gave my family something back of him: the knowledge that he had once been part of their lives. Telling their affectionate little anecdotes gratified them. They could take comfort in each other’s memories. But sharing memories of Andy was the last thing I wanted to do.
I rubbed my left temple. My headache was coming back. “I don’t think about Andy,” I told Susie. “There’s no point. He’s gone.” She stared at me, her face changing. I hated her for pitying me. When had she ever offered me real concern?
I said, “Min, it’s time for bed now. Let’s go brush your teeth.” I rested my hand on the top of her head, smoothing her glossy hair.
Min started and looked up at me. “But I’m not tired,” she said.
I smiled. “Come on, let’s say goodnight.”
“Are you ready?” I asked Min from the doorway of her tiny bedroom. I put my palms to my temples and pressed. My headache had reinstated itself, full-blown. The light from the hall threw a rectangle of brightness into the unlit room. Min lay with the blanket and sheet thrown off, her sleeveless cotton nightgown twisted and crumpled beneath her.
“It’s hot,” Min said.
I crossed the room to push the single window up as far as it would go. “I’ll leave the door open a little when I leave so you can have the cross breeze, okay?” She nodded. I sat down next to her on the edge of the bed.
“How many days until we go home, Mommy?”
“You’re not having fun?” I asked, resting the backs of my fingers against her warm cheek for a moment.
I heard a creak behind me. Jonathan walked softly into the room and sat down on the other side of the bed across from me. We looked at each other briefly in the half dark.
“Hi, Daddy,” Min said.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he answered, bending over her.
“Will you tell me a story? One with you and me in it?”
He brushed her hair back from her forehead with his fingers. “Not tonight, Min. It’s late. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll give you a backrub instead.”
“Okay.”
Min turned onto her stomach and pulled up her nightgown. In the gloom of the room, the white sheets were startlingly bright beside her olive skin. Jonathan began to knead her shoulders, then rub her back. His hand looked huge against her small body. With his fingers spread out, his palm easily spanned the width of her torso. I had never seen him give her a backrub before; usually one or the other of us put her to bed alone. Gently, Jonathan brushed his fingers down her spine and up again. He touched his daughter with so much tenderness it made my throat ache. I sat mutely by, watching. There was nothing for me to do.
When he was finished, Jonathan pulled down Min’s nightgown and patted her back.
“Bear hug,” he said.
“Rhinoceros hug,” she mumbled against her pillow.
“Elephant hug.”
“Whale hug.” Almost asleep.
“King Kong hug.”
“That’s too big,” she said, rousing briefly. “I’d get squished.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Jonathan said. “I would never squish you. You know that.” She was smiling. She had everything she wanted.
He bent over and kissed her hair, then stood up. I kissed her too and followed him out of the room, leaving the door ajar.
A few steps down the hall I whispered, “Jonathan! I want to talk to you.”
He turned back to me. “What about?”
“Not here. Let’s go to our room.”
“Can’t it wait? Your father offered me brandy.”
“Please. I need to talk to you.” I didn’t know why I was begging. My headache was worse.
He shrugged. “All right.”
We passed the living room and climbed the stairs to my childhood bedroom, ducking our heads where the ceiling came down at a sharp diagonal.
In the room Jonathan closed the door and fell onto the bed, the springs squeaking, while I went over to the bureau and fumbled for the switch on the lamp. I opened the aspirin bottle and swallowed four of the little white pills. The weak lamplight threw long shadows over the floral pattern on the walls. I remembered my dream of trying to keep my head above water in the perpetual dark, and the fear that something would grab me from the deep and pull me down.
His hands behind his head, Jonathan looked ordinary and familiar. My throat ached again as I looked at him, because I was afraid.
“Why are you standing way over there? Come here,” Jonathan suggested, patting the covers beside him.
It was what I had wanted to hear all day, but I couldn’t move. “How long have you been giving Min backrubs?” I asked.
His eyebrows went up. “I don’t know. A year or so?”
“You rub her back until she falls asleep?”
“Sometimes I make it a game. I spell words on her back and she guesses what they are. She draws a picture and I try to figure out what she’s drawn.”
“She rubs your back too?” I asked, startled. It seemed today I had stumbled on a whole treasure trove of secrets between them. I walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed, pressing my fingertips into my temples as hard as I could.
“Sure. She likes it. Unlike her mother,” Jonathan said. I had always gotten bored after a few minutes of rubbing his back. “What’s wrong, Catherine?” He sat up and kneaded my arm in a friendly way.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, shrugging him off. “Don’t you think I could see how you were looking at Susie down at the pool? I don’t care how provocative she was being—”
“You’re the one who’s being provocative,” Jonathan interrupted me.
I turned on him. “Don’t use my words against me, Jonathan.” My rage had come unleashed. All I wanted was to decimate him, I didn’t care how. “Just because you see things your way doesn’t mean they’re true.”
“You are really out of whack, Catherine. You don’t seriously think I lust after Susie, do you?”
“You did it right in front of me.”
“Then you’re as hidebound as your parents.”
“I thought you liked my parents. My father wants to keep you in his pocket with the rest of his change. You’re a good little man.”
Instead of becoming angry, as I expected, Jonathan stroked his beard with one hand, watching me. “What’s going on here? Are you jealous of my relationship with your parents?”
I screamed at him, “I am not jealous! Why can’t you understand?” and suddenly I was making horrible, dry sobbing sounds from deep inside my chest, but I couldn’t cry any tears. Something was wrong with me. I couldn’t go on feeling this way. I realized that Jonathan was holding me, saying, “Shhhh, shhhh.” Why couldn’t he help me? Jonathan stroked my back. After a long time, I started to calm down.
Jonathan said, his voice near my ear, “I don’t know why this happens between us, Cath. We never used to fight.”
Something was wrong with me, and I didn’t know what it was. Something that pulled at me and kept me apart. I needed Jonathan to understand so he could help me get back. But I had given up expecting him to. He said, “Shhhh, shhhh,” and began to kiss my face, small kisses, gestures of good faith.
When he started to kiss my neck, I breathed, and it sounded like a sigh. Jonathan watched me as he took off my glasses. He loosened my hair from its ponytail. The heavy mass of it fell forward into my face. I touched the bristly hairs of his beard, and he smiled. “Don’t do a thing,” he said. “This is my show now.” He pushed me back gently against the pillows and bent over me, kissing me.
When I closed my eyes, my headache was gone, and the long shadows on the wall were shut away. I gave myself over to Jonathan, as I had hundreds of times before. I didn’t know what else to do. He was tender, as always. I loved how sexy he made me feel. But there was still something very wrong with me, and it made me afraid. I let Jonathan take me with him, holding him as close as any two people can get, frantic for more.