Elliot said, “It has to be one of these next ones.”
Everything in the woods looked the same under the blanket of white. Sarah often thought that once they were able to drive to their parents’ cabin without aid or difficulty, they would finally have reached adulthood. But they were both in their thirties now, Elliot divorced, or nearly so, and Sarah was five months pregnant. Although the pregnancy was still a secret from her parents, a butterfly heartbeat beneath her bulky winter clothes.
Elliot grunted and Sarah knew this meant he had spotted the sign for their cabin, as the car lurched left and down, slower but still bumping and skidding. Twigs bent from snow-laden branches skimmed against the windows at startling intervals, each sudden tap like a threat or a beckoning.
“Why do we always leave it so late to drive up?” she asked. The forest at night made her nervous, though no doubt it was safer than her neighbourhood in Queens by far. But most things in life made her nervous now. Compared to her tortured relationship with everyday living, the normal concerns of a healthy pregnancy were a welcome relief. But she still felt like a gymnast on all fours, cowering inch by inch across a beam. A beam she had once been able to dance across backwards, eyes closed, half flying.
“Because we’re busy?” said Elliot. He stared straight ahead, driving with a rigid attentiveness that Sarah chalked up to her pregnancy. He’d kissed her on the cheek when he picked her up, his hand at her elbow. A gentle, strange thing, that kiss. “Because we don’t want to go?” Another branch smacked the roof, but he didn’t flinch. “Because you don’t want to tell Mom and Dad about the baby?”
“That’s true.”
Elliot had made excuses for her at Thanksgiving, but she couldn’t avoid her parents any longer. She looked out the window into a darkness that seemed even blacker beyond the guiding yellow of the headlights. She wished she’d seen her family’s sign as they’d driven past. It was part of the ritual: catching sight of that elaborate wooden arrow nailed to the tree at the turnoff. Unlike the other signs, with only a name—JOHNSTON or BLAIKIE or MACPHERSON—dug out in straight and narrow lettering, theirs read LARSEN CABIN in broad, rounded letters, charred to appear rustic; the whole thing varnished to a neat and weather-resistant gold. It was something her parents had done in a sudden fit of craftiness when she and Elliot were still children. An ostentatious in-joke, since their name wasn’t Larsen at all. Ridiculous.
“The road’s been used recently,” said Elliot, “so they’re probably already up here.” He maneuvered the last turn, easing the huge car forward into a partially cleared spot beside a red Jetta, which was still running. “Are they still in the car?” he said, and Sarah was alarmed for a moment as the high beams illuminated the silhouettes of two figures slumped in the front seat. But Elliot shut off the Impala’s engine and Sarah got out to find her parents just sitting in the car, quite alive, leaning into each other in their down parkas, fiddling with the radio and clouding the windows with the heat of their breath, of themselves.
Their mother threw open her door. “Children! My beloved offspring. You made it.”
“Fruit of our loins,” said Frank. “Greetings.”
“What are you doing?” asked Elliot. “You haven’t started getting anything ready.”
“Not even a hello?” said Gretchen. Her voice was mild as she got out of the car, heading for the shovels they kept stored in the shed. “We’ve just been listening to the live broadcast from the Met. It’s Turandot. We love Turandot! You just have to stop to take it in.”
Frank said, “I can’t believe you turned up so late, hoping to miss all the work. I’m on to your game now, see.”
Sarah thought her brother should know better than to try to shame their parents, unless he wanted to pursue an actual ethical debate.
But Elliot shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d sit there wasting gas just to teach us a lesson.”
“Can’t you?” said Sarah.
Gretchen returned and passed Elliot a shovel, then bent to begin digging out a path to the door. She was tall and fit, but awkward at most physical tasks.
“Oh, come now,” said Frank. He got out and motioned for the spade. “Here,” he said, holding the car door for Sarah. She got in. It was warm, and she began to sweat almost instantly. She pulled open the neck of her coat. They’d left the radio tuned to classical. Some opera. Puccini maybe. Perhaps that’s what her mother was talking about.
Before her, the cabin huddled on its little hill, snow on the roof and halfway up the door. To the right, the ground fell away at a steep grade to the lake, and to the left, a narrow path wound upwards to the outhouse. Squat and square, the log cabin was pint-sized compared to the large summer houses that had sprung up around the lake. Frank and Gretchen had dubbed it Larsen Cabin after they saw The Gold Rush, a Charlie Chaplin movie set mostly in an old prospector’s shack hanging half off the edge of a cliff. Black Larsen’s place. They had bought the cabin when they were very young for an amount that had seemed like a lot of money, but which now struck everyone as an absurdity, practically an affront.
“Too bad Dory won’t be coming,” Gretchen said to Sarah as she got back in the car, shivering.
“Oh,” said Sarah. “I guess.”
“I think it’s for the best, though,” said Gretchen. “The split.”
Sarah looked over at her mother. Driven and unapologetic, Dory had always been a great favourite of Gretchen’s. “Me too,” said Sarah. Elliot had confided to her on the drive up that Dory had left him for another woman.
“Dory and I went for a drink last week.” Gretchen leaned back, shook out her sleeves until her hands disappeared. “I told her at least she’ll be able to focus more on her work now.”
“Right,” said Sarah. “Well. Elliot, too.” Her brother had worked the same beat for the NYPD for years, and Sarah knew that, like her, he was only ambitious when it came to personal happiness, not professional advancement.
She watched him with a vague jealousy as he snapped off the huge icicles from above the cabin door. He turned to grin at her before launching them like darts into the snow heap.
“Oh, honey,” said Gretchen. “You know, I’ve never understood why you and Dory aren’t closer.”
“We’re close enough.” Though Sarah had always suspected her ex-sister-in-law didn’t exactly like her, Dory and Elliot had taken her in when she’d turned up on their doorstep with nothing but a dirty rucksack and a wavering hope that she was finally thinking her own thoughts. Back then, Dory couldn’t help bombarding her with unanswerable questions about why she’d joined Living Tree in the first place. But Elliot seemed to understand, without needing to be told, that Sarah just needed to be warm, and quiet. Safe. Still, she was grateful to Dory for never complaining within earshot about how she’d shredded the guest bedsheets to weave into rag rugs, or about the long, red hairs that had started to collect in all the drains. It wasn’t until three months later that Sarah seemed to wake up and notice that the spot on her brother’s couch she had been occupying around the clock had become a major depression in more ways than one.
Frank and Elliot had disappeared inside the cabin.
“And we’re in,” said Sarah, popping open the car door.
At some point in its history, her family’s cabin had reached a fork at which it could have come into its own as either an affectionate or mocking tribute to old-fashioned cottages, or as something comfortable but plain. But with its mismatched furniture and crockery, bare wooden bunks, and incoherent decor, Sarah thought that it had somehow become both. Hanging around the walls were old pairs of catgut snowshoes that Frank bought whenever he found them cheap at a garage sale. Gretchen had contributed a couple of amateur oil paintings of nude women sourced from junk shops, as well as a terrible, motion-activated singing fish advertised on late-night television. Then there were all the rag rugs, and the shutters with a pattern of hearts cut
out at the top.
They carried everything in from the cars and took stock of the food they’d packed. Elliot turned on the electricity, then put on the lights. There was no question of anything festive. No eggnog. No turkey. Frank and Gretchen had adopted their strict anti-Christmas stance in the seventies, shortly after they were married, when they decided they took a dim view of people who weren’t even Christian but who still went in for all the hoopla. At first, they stayed in town, declining invitations to parties, inviting people over only to serve whisky and play jazz records. But the story was that once Elliot and Sarah started school, they became so disagreeable and demanding, always whining about not getting any presents, that their parents began the tradition of dragging them out to the lake, isolating the family in a holiday-free zone.
Frank and Gretchen had packed chicken breasts, spinach, four bottles of Perrier, one cucumber, and a large quantity of dried Italian sausage.
“I remembered to bring herbs this time,” said Gretchen. “And olive oil and salt.”
“And I remembered the essentials.” Frank revealed two bottles of wine and one of Crown Royal.
Elliot had a cooler filled with steaks, bread, eggs, pasta, bottled tomato sauce, oatmeal, and peanut butter. Coffee and beer. All in quantities enough to share. He had also bought two four-gallon jugs of water.
Sarah bent to retrieve her bag of supplies, exhaling as a small spasm stung her back. As she straightened up, she caught her mother looking at her with a critical eye.
“Have you put on weight?”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “I’ve really been letting myself go.” She unzipped her bulky coat and let it slip from her shoulders, revealing her pregnant belly. She cupped her hands above and below the bump, emphasis and embrace, and Frank and Gretchen stopped moving. Elliot put down a carton of eggs.
“This shouldn’t be a surprise,” she said. “I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been saying I wanted a baby ever since I came back from Bolivia.”
The comment seemed to unfreeze her parents.
“Well, you’ve been saying lots of things, honey,” said Gretchen, and Sarah’s eyes brimmed. When Elliot groaned, their mother turned up her palms like someone cornered. “What? She has.”
Elliot ignored her and crossed the room to give Sarah a hug. His stubble grazed her cheek, which he kissed again. “May I?” he asked. Sarah nodded, and he put a hand on her belly. “This is big news.” He said this as much to their parents as to her. A demonstration. “This is the most wonderful thing.”
Sarah’s heart went out to him in gratitude as she blinked back tears. She would think of this instance of kindness often in the years to come, as a foundational moment for everything that followed.
“Congratulations, sweetheart,” said her father, though he still looked bewildered.
Next to him, her mother nodded. “Yes,” said Gretchen, though it sounded grudging.
“I’ll help you with this,” said Elliot, taking the bag from Sarah.
Wiping her eyes, she followed him to the counter and arranged her offerings across it: cheese and crackers, ginger ale, chocolate, four large cans of yellow pea soup, a tiny bottle of dill pickles.
Gretchen tutted over her supplies, shaking her head as Sarah placed them on the table. “Rather a poor showing, my daughter. I had higher hopes.” Her voice had returned to normal. “Do you remember that hunter’s stew you brought last year? And the garlic-stuffed olives from Trader Joe’s?”
“Are you kidding?” Sarah said, baffled that the conversation had somehow already moved on. “At least I remembered a can opener.” There had been one or two bad years when everyone forgot. It would probably be another couple of years before her parents managed to buy one for the cabin.
Gretchen shrugged, then began putting some of the food away into the cupboards. “No need to get upset,” she said, unflustered. “That’s the first thing you learn as a mother. Everyone expects you take care of them.”
“I’m having the baby by myself,” said Sarah, once they moved to the living room, determined not to let her parents’ nonchalance set the agenda. Her knit woollen sweater was stretched tight over her stomach. She had taken to swathing herself in things that gave her belly the comforting aspect of a familiar old blanket or stuffed animal. Nubbly brown wool or plaid flannel to neutralize its bulging, disorienting effect.
“Having children is what produces adults,” Frank said. “Or so the saying goes.” He squinted at his wife. “Who said that, dear?” Gretchen shrugged.
Sarah turned her attention to her father. “Are you saying I’m too immature to have a child?”
“No,” he said, looking alarmed. “Of course not.”
Now, as they sat together, settled on the worn sofa and armchairs, Sarah switched her focus from Frank to Gretchen. “I thought you guys would be supportive. But you clearly don’t even want to talk about it.”
Her mother acted surprised. “Of course I’m supportive. Why wouldn’t I be?”
But Sarah just stared at her, feeling her mouth settle into a hard little knot of resentment—what Elliot always called her “prune face”—but she could do nothing to stop it. “You haven’t even asked if it’s a boy or a girl.” She realized it was just another way her parents could prove themselves extraordinary, by being extraordinarily relaxed.
Gretchen sighed. “Give me time. I can’t be excited about something that doesn’t exist yet.” She leaned over the arm of the couch to rub Sarah’s belly with a strong, circular touch that stirred the baby and struck Sarah as wise and intuitive. When the baby kicked, she withdrew her hand.
“I just wonder,” her mother said, sitting back, “given the state of the world, whether we ought to be bringing more children into it.” Next to her, Frank was nodding.
“Well, you had us,” said Elliot, sounding exasperated. He was over at the stove now, feeding it more wood. “It’s not like everything was a picnic back then either.”
“No, but it’s worse now. Plus, the idea back then was that having children would be good for your art.” Gretchen had been a poet for a brief but fiery period before she was married. She started her academic career after Frank, though she had by now eclipsed him. “But the time constraints can be prohibitive, no matter your new depths of feeling for the human experience. Plus, you haven’t even started your career yet, not really.”
“I have a job, Mom,” said Sarah. “I did my degree. What more do you want?”
“I want you to want more.” It was an old conversation between the two of them.
“I want this baby,” said Sarah. “That’s what I want.” Throughout all her years at Living Tree, it was the one and only thing that had continued to feel right: a baby on her hip, staring up at her with a dazzled, trusting face. A clarity of need and response. Giggly smiles and silly dances and nonsense reigning as the prevailing order among all the children in her charge.
“You know,” said Frank. “I’ve never even met the father.” In his voice was a kind of wonder as to whether this should appall or impress him.
“Neither have I,” said Sarah. “I went to a sperm bank.”
In any other family, she thought, there would be protests of disbelief or dismay. But she was known for her straightforward, serious bent. From time to time it had helped a joke go over huge, but now her parents just stared at her.
Elliot stood abruptly. “The stove,” he said, moving towards it.
“I’m surprised you didn’t want to wait,” said Frank, who looked as though he was trying to puzzle it out. “For the right guy. I mean, you’ve still got time.”
“Why should I wait?” asked Sarah. Her voice was a bark. The only thing she had been waiting for was this exact question. She’d had a feeling her parents were not quite unconventional enough to avoid asking it. “Why should I have to wait for a man?”
Frank, mild as always, only shru
gged.
“What kind of a man donates to a sperm bank?” asked Gretchen, though Sarah could tell from her tone that it was neither a judgmental nor a rhetorical question. Her mother was huddled under the quilt, her chin bobbing in a thoughtful bounce on her knee.
“Someone generous?” said Sarah. “Open-minded?”
Elliot came back from the stove with red cheeks. “I did once,” he said. “Actually, a bunch of times, in college. To buy my car. But it was for research, not babies.”
“Are you kidding?” said Sarah, almost as tickled as she was bewildered. “Was that when you were dating Keisha Delille?”
“Yes, dating,” he said. “And then dumping.”
“Keisha?” said Gretchen. “I always liked her.”
“But…why?” asked Sarah.
“Why did I dump her? She was too good for me, remember?”
They both laughed. “That’s not what I meant,” said Sarah.
“Did you look at a magazine?” asked Gretchen, with interest.
Sarah knew her mother had argued both sides of the feminist pornography debate, though more convincingly—to Gretchen’s continuing chagrin—from a pro-censorship position. There were papers in academic journals using Howe (1981) to combat Howe (1997).
Elliot just shook his head.
“Wait. Where did you do it?” Sarah almost spat out the words.
He gave her a sharp look. “Back in Massachusetts. I think it’s closed down now, though.”
“Oh thank God,” she said. She swallowed, leaned her head towards her knees. She’d gone to a place on West 59th Street, across from the park. The ginger ale in her glass tipped out onto the floor.
Gretchen began laughing until she nearly cried. It was a terrible laugh, thought Sarah, who was almost on the point of retching. “Stop it,” she said, her voice croaking.
Her mother chuckled, throwing off the quilt. “Oh, come on. Really, what would have been the odds?”
“Pretty good, I should think,” said Frank. “I just read about this in the Times. Now that more women are refusing anonymous donors, there’s a shortage.”
Songs for the End of the World Page 26
