In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  XXII

  I returned home from Centennial as from a kind of initiation or exile, the graduate now, some special seal set on my difference that made it a thing at once nameable and thoroughly arcane. For several days the question of what I planned to do next seemed to hang like a suspicion between my father and me, but then when my father finally came round to it there seemed no way of putting things to him in all their complexity.

  “Africa?” He seemed truly uncomprehending, balking as at some outrageous whim. “I can’t believe there aren’t any jobs around here for teachers that you have to go to Africa.”

  “It’s not that. It’s a kind of volunteer thing. Anyway I’m hot really qualified to teach here, I’d have to go back to school again.”

  But already I’d put things badly.

  “If you need to go back to school I don’t see why you don’t finish now. I can’t see how it can help you to go to Africa.”

  It might have taken so little to win him over, the single word from me that could have brought him into the meaning of what I was doing, allayed his sense of betrayal, at my withholding from him, at my leaving, at my refusal to offer any pattern to my life he could make easy sense of, going off now to another country like an immigrant, accepting that humiliation when no logic compelled it. But there seemed no language between us that wasn’t infected somehow with misunderstanding.

  “It’s just something I want to do. Anyway it’s only for two years.”

  He had planned a graduation party for me but the pleasure of it seemed lost for him now in this confusion over my future. For several days he appeared to brood over the question, till finally Tsi’Alfredo offered to hold the party in the rec room of the new house he’d recently built.

  “If I was his age I’d be doing the same thing,” he said of my plans. Since he’d built his house a new sense of well-being seemed to have come over him. “Look at us, all our lives shedding blood in those damn greenhouses, we’ve never been farther than Niagara Falls.”

  “Sì,” my father said, “we broke our backs and now they take it all for granted.”

  But he needed only to see there was no shame in what I was doing to begin to relent, seemed almost ready to take some pride in me, to admit whatever unrealized part of himself, his own lost freedom, he saw taking vicarious shape in me now.

  Tsi’Alfredo’s house had been built in the preferred style of Mersea’s Italians, long and white-bricked and ornate, sitting raised on a small knoll of bulldozed earth next to his old one, where his son Gino now lived with his wife, as in some before and after picture in a tale of immigrant success. Upstairs the house was a mausoleum of useless rooms, unlived-in, the walls left unpainted while the plaster set, and the sparse new furnishings, with their islands of sudden extravagance, seeming lost in the house’s immensity. But the rec room was a clash of old and new, with a built-in bar at one end and a full kitchen all in gleaming ceramic but then aging furnishings brought over from the other house like a re-creation of it, the old fridge and gas stove, the sagging old couch and armchair, the old black-and-white TV. It was as if this part of the house had been saved as the truer refuge against which the upstairs remained merely the idea of what was possible, the promise we held out to ourselves while continuing on with our in-between lives.

  Tables had been set up at one end of the room for the meal, dense now with cutlery and dishes and glass. People showed me an odd good-humoured deference, handing me envelopes stuffed with cash, seeming ready to believe that some sort of transformation had taken place in me. At the beginning of the meal Tsi’Alfredo proposed a toast to me, making some suggestive allusion in dialect about African women that I couldn’t quite follow.

  “Anyway he’s spent half his life in the jungle working in his father’s greenhouses so I guess he should be all right in Africa.”

  I had the sense briefly of what it might mean to be accepted by these people, these half-strangers, my family, how it might feel to see myself as the flourishing of their collective will, the one their hopes resided in, instead of being so far from them, going out from their alienness now as toward some return to my truer self.

  “Maybe when you come back you can bring some of that sunshine with you,” Tsi’Umberto said.

  But I didn’t think of myself as ever really coming back, ever being held again within the sphere of their static world.

  Then after my few minutes of their attention people settled back into their usual languid incuriousness. I was sitting next to Tsi’Alfredo’s daughter Nina, remembered watching her when I was younger whenever we’d worked together, the curve of her body against her clothes, the mist of sweat at her temples in the greenhouse heat, remembered the small hatred in me toward her then for her air of normalcy and disdain when she wasn’t so unlike me. But now she might have belonged to a different generation, unquestioningly in her place here, still enviable in a way in this at-homeness though I could hardly understand any more how my blood had quickened once at the sight of her.

  “So I guess you won’t be coming home or anything while you’re over there.”

  “I dunno, I doubt it.”

  “I always thought I might want to do something like that, just go away, maybe not for two years but maybe for a year or something.”

  But there seemed no real envy in her voice, merely the moment’s interest in something she considered outside the true realm of her life.

  The meal wound down, slowly disintegrating in its last courses into the inevitable movement of children, the sated pulling away from the table, the women’s bustle of cleaning up. In this slow unfurling of ourselves we seemed almost a normal family, almost thriving, comfortable in the day’s excesses, the food and the liquor, the noise of children and conversation. But I caught sight of my father at one point sitting alone at the end of a table looking suddenly old and forlorn like some forgotten patriarch; and in the gloom that flickered through me then I felt my continuing connection to him, the sameness, after all, that had always joined us but also my wish to have him approve now, an impossibility, of my need to escape him.

  I worked for a couple of weeks on the farm. We’d recently built several more greenhouses, in plastic, as people were doing now, hunched narrow constructions of purlins and hooped steel that rolled out like dunes beyond the last of the glass greenhouses. Yet for all this ongoing expansion there was an unfamiliar air of leisure on the farm, the more monotonous work done now by the workers we brought up from Mexico every year on contract. Offshore labour, they were called, which conjured up in my mind a vision of them parked in houseboats off a coast and rowing in to shore every morning to work; and this image seemed to fit the reality of their lives, their long unrelieved hours of toil and then their retreat every night into the tiny private world of the trailer my father had set up for them near the boiler room, their muted voices sometimes drifting from there late at night to my bedroom window as across a lake.

  The Mexicans and I greeted each other every morning when I came out to work with a deferential half bow and a buenos días, courteous and timid like lovers. I kept resolving to try to strike up a conversation with them, but the days passed and we never got beyond our smiling greetings. They were our past, what we’d been when we’d first arrived here, with their low wages and their subservience, their insistence on working twelve- and thirteen-hour days to make the most of the few months every year that they were allowed in the country; and yet there seemed no clear way now of bridging the distance between us, of avoiding the inevitable habit of mind of merely thinking of them as our workers. They held quiet parties sometimes on Sundays outside their trailer, friends coming by on bicycles from other farms carting six-packs of beer, and a ghetto-blaster perched at the screen of one of the trailer windows playing tinny cassettes of guitar and quavery vocals, the group of them seeming there in the sun, with their rickety table and chairs, like a backdrop in some American western; and though my father occasionally joined them then for a beer, speaking to them in his pidgi
n Spanish, still there was in his indulgence of them always a boss’s condescension, the hint that next to his own complex life theirs was simple and rustic and innocent, how he himself must have seemed to the inglesi years before playing cards some Sunday afternoon outside his little barnyard shack.

  In our living room there were two aerial photos of the farm, one taken not long after my father had bought it, with only the old boiler room, the old greenhouses, the barn, and then a wide stretch of flat green field, the other taken the previous fall just after the plastics had been built; and what struck me most about them was how each so clearly belonged to its different era, the first like a film set’s recreation of the past, its few buildings worn and domestic and pastoral, dwarfed by the lush expansiveness of the landscape that surrounded them, while the second was staunchly, impressively modern, all concrete and glittering metal and glass. The trees around the house had been cut back or down; the irrigation pond, which in the first photo was an oasis of plant-and water-green, had been stripped down to a haggard earthen grey, its banks nearly barren except for the odd sapling or clump of weeds cropping up through the years of garbage that had been poured down them. It was as if the natural world had been slowly colonized by the greenhouses, made internal, as if against the momentary idyll, sun-drenched and impermanent, of that single summer day in the past we had built up instead this fortress of perpetual summer, while what was outside it, what was changeable and unfixed, slowly wasted away in its irrelevance; and perhaps all our progress had been no more than that, this attempt to hold time in place, free ourselves from it, to somehow arrive again in the new leisure all our work had afforded us at the simplicity we imagined we saw now in our Mexican workers, longed for in us like a memory of some sun-filled afternoon, without crisis or threat, that seemed as if it must stretch on to time’s end.

  XXIII

  I saw Rita toward the end of May. She was sixteen now, tall and lithe and womanly except for the downy adolescence of her complexion, her blue eyes set off like opals against the raven black of her hair. A new restraint had gradually taken shape between us over the previous years with the growing scarcity of my visits and with her own rapid maturing, her old childishness gone now like some possession cast out of her and little pretence remaining of a generational distance between us, with the strange decorum and licence that that had brought. Our new decorum was more adult and hence simpler and more oppressive, around me Rita seeming to close down some essential part of herself now, retreating into a dutifully cheerful sociability as if changing into proper clothes for a guest.

  “Africa, that’s wild! Sort of like a missionary or something.”

  “Not exactly. There’s no religion involved or anything.”

  “Anyway that sounds great. I’d love to do something like that.”

  But finally she seemed as incurious about my plans as my family had been. I felt a kind of revulsion at her forced agreeableness, the hint in it of Mrs. Amherst.

  “So how are things with you?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  It came out that she and Elena would be spending the summer in England with Mrs. Amherst and her family.

  “It’s just to see family and stuff,” she said, downplaying the trip as if in deference to my own. “I guess it’ll be pretty boring.”

  “I dunno, it sounds great.”

  The visit left me with a familiar dejection. Away from Rita I would go days, weeks, without a thought of her, felt guilty then at how small a space I left for her in the daily unfolding of my emotions. Yet each time I saw her some nerve in me was touched, some old rawness, as if all along the shadow of her had lain at the back of my consciousness.

  She was leaving in a matter of weeks; by the time she returned I’d be gone. I let a week pass without seeing her, vaguely imagining she’d eventually call, then feeling resentful when she didn’t, even though I realized how I must seem to her, merely this moody half-stranger who suddenly appeared in her life from time to time as out of nowhere. Finally I called and arranged to see her the following Sunday.

  “I just thought we should have a chance to talk before you go.”

  “Sure. That sounds nice.”

  There was a wariness in her voice on the phone, but then when I arrived on Sunday she seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

  “Hi, stranger, I thought you’d forgotten about us.”

  She was dressed in a short, pleated skirt with legs bare beneath and a large pullover that puffed her upper body into formlessness, an odd mix of pale, exposed flesh and bundled warmth.

  “I guess I’ve just been busy on the farm and everything,” I said.

  I suggested we go for a drive. I wanted her alone for once, outside the roles we seemed consigned to in the Amhersts’ house.

  “All ready for your trip?”

  “I guess so. We went shopping in Windsor yesterday for clothes and stuff.”

  “Maybe I’ll come to see you off at the airport.”

  “That would be great.”

  We drove a few minutes in silence. Rita seemed lost in her thoughts, unmindful of me, of the car’s intimacy, my silent awareness of her sitting there beside me.

  “Where’re we going?”

  “I thought maybe we could drive out to the Point or something.”

  “That’s where people go to neck.”

  “Is that where you go?”

  “Haw haw. Anyway Mom won’t let us start dating till next year, what a drag.”

  We talked a few minutes more, then lapsed again into silence.

  “So is anything up?” Rita said finally.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I dunno. It just sounded like something important when you said you wanted to see me, usually you just come over.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you’d be home.” I felt uneasy suddenly at the claim I’d made to her attention. “Anyway we might not see each other again for two years, I thought we should have a chance to talk.”

  Rita dropped her voice to a mock-portentousness.

  “ ‘The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘to talk of many things.’ ”

  I was surprised by this sudden literateness in her.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I dunno, it’s just a line from some poem, it just came into my head.”

  “Since when did you start quoting poetry?”

  I hadn’t quite been able to phrase it as a compliment but still she flushed with awkward pleasure.

  “Maybe you’re not the only one in the family with brains.”

  We’d come to the tollbooth at the entrance to the park. I recognized the attendant from high school, one of the popular boys then, even now radiating the same sheen of blithe unthinking self-confidence. An instinctive shame pulsed through me, my mind doing a rapid inventory of the things that might compromise me; but he showed no sign of recognizing me.

  “Have a good day, sir.”

  We drove into the park in silence, the car engine echoing hollowly beneath the canopy the trees formed over the road and the air growing heavy with the smell of humus and lakewater. A dejection passed through me like a chill – the woods seemed to reduce us somehow, with their gloomy chaos of growth and rot, spindly sumachs and beeches and maples struggling up like abandoned things through the twilight of vines and fallen limbs. On a school field trip once we’d gone out to the very tip of the Point, the land tapering down into the lake there like the last draining away of a continent; and I’d thought then of the first explorers arriving at that tiny foothold centuries before, of the tangle of endless forest confronting them alien as another planet.

  Rita was staring through her window into the trees; something in the angle I saw her at, half-turned in her seat, only her cheek visible and then the long sleek black of her hair, made her seem a stranger suddenly.

  “I guess I should come out here more often, people make such a big deal about it,” she said. “Watch the birds or something.”

  �
�You could come swimming.”

  “Yeah, right. Mercury City.”

  I turned off the main road onto the gravelled one that led to the West Beach. There was a couple sunbathing there in the early-June chill, then a family picnicking at one of the tables set along the beach’s length as at some lakeside café; I drove beyond them to the far end of the parking area and parked facing out toward the lake. To the left the shoreline curved gradually round to the Mersea boardwalk, distantly visible in the afternoon glare; but ahead of us there was only the lake, stretching out a steely northern blue as endless as the sea.

  I took out a cigarette.

  “Could you spare one?”

  Rita had turned on the seat and bent a leg onto it.

  “You shouldn’t be smoking,” I said, but held one out to her.

  “I only smoke when I’m nervous.”

  “Are you nervous now?”

  “I dunno.” She looked away toward the beach and let out a thin line of smoke. There was a woman in baggy shorts and a bandana spreading a towel out there; as she bent to straighten it, her blouse sagged for an instant to reveal a patch of ruddy cleavage. “I guess when you called I figured you wanted to talk about our mother and all that.”

  I was caught off guard. The suggestion seemed so unlikely I couldn’t think how to respond to it, pre-emptive somehow, premature. At some level I’d long imagined beginning this conversation with her, passing on to her this trust; but now the moment seemed lost even as it was offered, ruined by her having suddenly thrust it before us in all its awkwardness.