Family meeting to discuss where we were headed. To discuss Jane. Everyone said a prayer. Mom had called Anna’s parents and they said they would pick Jane up in New York City. She was safely on the Greyhound now and fine, and would be home in two days. Mom had arranged to be in touch with Jane through Anna’s parents twice a day to make sure that nothing went wrong. I imagined Jane eating the sandwiches I had made for her. Wondered if they’d all squooshed together and gotten soggy. Finny sat by my side and held my hand.
Anton told us the story of the Prodigal son, from the Bible. Nicholas burped. I laughed. I looked around the table. Sofia sucked on the ends of her hair. No one seemed to be listening to Anton’s story except James, who fingered his chin, staring at Anton and then at us. His expression soft but irritated, with that look from the night Jane left coming back to his eyes, as if he could see something we couldn’t.
Anton went on and on, and when he was finished, James said, “You make your own rules, don’t you?”
“No. Before making any rules I ask God. I believe in higher authority. It would be too much responsibility to make all the rules myself,” Anton said, flirting with James.
James smiled and tipped his head in a nod, but that look didn’t leave his eye. He wore a pair of jeans with holes in the knees and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his shoulders. His arms were very tanned. He hadn’t shaved.
“Sometimes people have to go off and figure out for themselves what’s right,” Anton said to all of us. The waitress asked if we were ready to order. She was short and Mexican with silky, long black hair. Her teeth were surrounded with gold. Anton said two-dollar limit and we all ordered something. Some Mexican music played on the jukebox. Everyone started talking about this and that.
“What kind of rules does God make for your children?” James asked, interrupting the chatter. Anton raised his eyes and looked at James, realizing he wasn’t making fun. The waitress came over with some nachos. Everyone took one. Anton slipped one in his mouth without taking his eyes off James. Another fight, I thought, and shut my eyes.
“I love you, man,” James said. “You’ve been more than generous. You’ve helped me out a lot. You’ve helped out Dwayne. You’ve helped Cynthia. You’ve helped out everyone. But Anton, we’ve got a problem.” The way James talked I thought our world would end and I got scared inside. I opened my eyes to see if Anton were beginning to swell, but he wasn’t. Nothing. Only that flirtatious smile lingered on his face, drooping there, fading slowly. He tried to hold it, as if trying to maintain the inscrutable face, but even the bluff didn’t seem to come. I wanted him to swell.
Mom ran her thumbnail over her lip. “Jane will be all right. I’ve arranged things. In two days she’ll be home.” She spoke quietly and then tried to change the subject. She asked whether we’d prefer the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas.
“I don’t just mean Jane,” James said. “I mean Finny. He isn’t speaking. I mean Nicholas, who’s always drinking.”
Nicholas burped again and then smiled. “Don’t get me in trouble,” he said in a teasing sort of way. Cynthia Banks laughed.
James ignored them. “I mean Kate, who’s becoming a religious freak. I mean all these kids who should be somewhere.” A new song played. The singer, a woman, had a whiny voice.
“Looky here, babe. I appreciate what you’re saying,” Anton said, softly but quickly, stuttering a little.
“These nachos suck,” Timothy said. He sipped some of Nicholas’s beer and burped. Anton told him to be quiet.
“It’s not about getting someplace,” Mom said. “You’ve got to think about…”
“Eve, babe, I’ll speak for myself,” Anton said.
“I’ll say what I please,” Mom said. I was afraid he’d get mad at her, but he didn’t.
“You’re missing the point, James,” Anton went on. “It’s about being where you are. You can’t always be thinking about where you’ll be next. Didn’t one of your countrymen, Leonard Woolf, write The Journey Not the Arrival Matters?”
“When are we going back to Europe, Dad?” Sofia asked.
“Sofia, babe.”
“This is their business,” Dwayne said to James. “Don’t interfere.” He wore all black and his white hair seemed yellow, shining in the inside light. I hated him. He was a parasite, that’s what Julia had said.
“You’ve been teaching us that,” James said to Anton. “But it can’t keep going on like this. What I’m understanding is that it may be fine for you and Eve to live like this, but it isn’t for the children.” He paused. He chewed on a toothpick. He seemed old and smart, yet he spoke cautiously. “At some point you have to have a plan for them. None of us has wanted to pay attention to this because, when we do, this world you’ve created, no matter how beautiful the good parts of it are, will be over. But Anton, it’s childish to continue like this.”
I thought of what Julia had said about Anton being a child and felt scared, afraid we’d have to protect him the way Julia wanted to. The waitress brought the food and we ate. Mom said nothing. Anton said nothing. His face changed. He was uncomfortable, shifting in his seat, then standing, but still he wasn’t getting mad. Mom studied him, hoping for something, for him to pull us out of this mess as he had done a thousand times before. Dwayne talked about some theories and Nicholas told him to shut up. James seemed to be waiting for an answer. That creepy look in his eyes; something lifted in him and for the first time he could see inside us. A heaviness settled down on all of us. Everything felt incredibly complicated. One moment you thought everything was one way, the next everything was completely different for no apparent reason. I ate a nacho. I wasn’t hungry.
I remembered Anton on the phone at Mark Bitar’s calling a relative in San Diego to ask if he and Eve and their eight kids and a friend could visit. I couldn’t hear what the person said of course, but on his face you could see that that person was saying no. No. We weren’t wanted. “I see,” he had kept saying, unsure of what to do with the no, shrinking in it. In the world he had created there was very little no. The only one of us who ever said no, who ever questioned him, had run away.
The door opened. A blast of noon heat rushed in. Outside was bright and hot and vast. The camper would be an oven. I wanted Anton to get mad. We were all staring at him, I could feel it, all of us wanting him to get mad, even Mom, as if his getting mad meant that he was in charge. His eyelids quivered. He glanced at Julia, who gave him a comforting look. He fingered his ring and stared down, into the table. There were eleven of us looking up at him from that table. He took a nacho from the plate and ate it slowly. He seemed alone and scared, as if he suddenly realized what he had on his hands – eight children, one of whom had run away, three strangers and a woman who wanted to be his wife. As if for the first time we were real. We were all frozen. It seemed Anton would break in half. Just looking at him made me feel terrible. He was big and vulnerable. His blue eyes flickered. Our world emptied, drained. No future and certainly no past. Get mad, I wanted to scream.
I tried to pray to God and then something awful occurred to me, fast, cut through my mind and then was gone. It occurred to me that Jane was right. “He’s a nobody,” she’d said. “Nothing without us.” I saw nobody in the place of Anton. I saw him stripped of everything, of his big and swollen self. The Almighty Leader of Erehwon. A blowfish without the blow. Get mad, I kept thinking. His invincibility was disintegrating fast, the cops were catching up with him, and even God, even Jesus, was gone from his side. I saw him now, ridiculous in those stupid clothes.
“Where are you driving us to?” I asked, trying to sound like Jane. I wanted to make him mad.
“Kate,” Mom said. She said my name quietly, but sharply, using it alone to tell me to shut up. She rose from her chair and made her way to Anton. Her white blouse was pressed – I imagined from our days at the Desert Princess. Her jeans stiff. Hair loose. She linked her arm in Anton’s and he pulled her to him, suddenly not so alone anymore. Anton held Mom close and
we all stared up at them, waiting.
Slowly she started to speak. At first saying only, “I think…” She paused. Her hair hung in her face. I imagined she was thinking about Jane. She lifted her head to face James. “You’re right,” she said. Then to Anton, “James is right about a lot of what he’s saying.” She said some comforting things about home. She said that going home didn’t mean the world we’d worked so hard to create would be over, that we’d still be able to live the way we wanted to there. She was tender, pouring love all over Anton. Her eyes were determined and strong, looking up to him. Her voice soft, but emphatic. “Doesn’t Paul say in the First Letter to the Corinthians that when he became an adult he had to put an end to childish ways? James is right, Anton. It is childish to continue like this. But it doesn’t mean we can’t find a new way. Together we will.”
Quietly Anton withdrew his eyes from Mom and stared at the ground. I was afraid he might cry. I didn’t want to see him cry. Instead he pulled a joint from his silver cigarette case and went outside, off by himself for awhile.
When he returned he told us that he’d decided we would go home to Jane, back to New Jersey, that he had a practice under way there. Mom encouraged us to all hug and love each other and we did, in the parking lot of the El Mojave bar, trying to make Anton feel strong and in charge again.
♦
I pictured Jane on her bus, lumbering along on Interstate 40, paving the way through Needles and Flagstaff, Albuquerque and Amarillo, Memphis, Nashville, one bend north just past Knoxville to 81 up through the Appalachians to New York City. I saw Jane on that thread of road, up there ahead of us with flags and trumpets leading the way, leading the caravan, the Utopia, as if we were tethered to her by some invisible force, as if Jane alone were painting that bright red road onto the map. “You’ll be home before you know it,” she’d said. I wondered if somewhere Jane knew that by leaving she’d get us home, as if she knew Mom wouldn’t leave her. “Could you really ever leave Mom?” I remembered Jane asking me. And then I smiled because it occurred to me that if Jane were leading us, it would be my money that was getting us home after all. And not just the four of us, but the whole damn family.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
The Day the Men Landed on the Moon
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
In the beginning there was nothing and from nothing came an explosion which created the heaven and the earth, and the emptiness filled, and the earth was a formless mass and void, and this happened all day Monday and until noon on Tuesday, and each day was seven hundred and fifty million years long.
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
And by Tuesday afternoon the earth took shape and a chemical reaction happened to form water and the earth was covered with water, a globe-girdling sea.
“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God called the firmament Heaven.”
And Heaven held the sun and the moon and the stars, stars so far away it could take four hundred years for their light to reach the earth.
“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.”
And all day Wednesday and all day Thursday and all day Friday and until afternoon on Saturday the scum accumulated on the waters and gathered and amassed until the scum became dry land and vegetation appeared, flora to feed the world.
And there was salt and sun and time.
“And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
And when there was plenty to eat, fauna appeared.
“And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”
And the fauna evolved, and by Saturday afternoon the reptiles appeared, and by midnight something mysterious happened on Earth and the reptiles vanished, and by early Sunday morning man appeared, and all day man evolved, and minutes after eleven P.M. on Sunday Christ appeared, and seconds later my father and Anton were born and with them our family came as a zillion families had come before – here for a millisecond, brief and at once both so important and insignificant, then gone.
♦
The day the men landed on the moon, our father left us. I was seven. Julia was nine. Jane was eleven.
I wondered what it would have been like that day if Brian Cain hadn’t come to our house. If our father had come home.
That morning Dad left in his white tennis outfit, with a wind-breaker in case it rained. He had a tennis racquet under his arm and his thick, curly black hair was a mess. Mom said he looked like a poet with his hair all wild and messy. He kissed us and drove off. We played on the lawn, running through a sprinkler. Mom gardened.
“Eagle has landed,” Armstrong said that afternoon, and we would have heard it on the crackling radio. We would have run inside to the TV and seen the spaceship landing on the Sea of Tranquillity after a near miss in a crater field. Dad would have returned in the early evening and we would have had a late dinner on the front lawn, watching the TV Dad had promised to bring out on the end of a long extension cord.
It would have happened like this: The cord snaked through the wet grass to the house. We sat on a tarp and a plaid blanket that Dad had laid down. The wool scratched our bare skin. Fireflies blinked crazily over the front lawn like stars. Dad’s eyes were sad. Inside he had a choice to make: Camille or us. We could all tell he was sad. He was a million miles away. Dad never could hide his mood. He was like Jane. They didn’t have inscrutable faces. Bad moods settled on them like a black cloud.
Mom ran back and forth to the kitchen nervously, talking about nothing just to talk, bringing out the chicken and the salad and the rolls. At the end, Dad’s moods could do this to her. A bottle of red wine stood open on a cutting board, next to two glasses, beautiful like tulips, half filled with Burgundy. Up again. Mom dashed to the kitchen for the forgotten knives and Julia crawled on top of Dad and Jane started to tickle his hair and I pushed Julia off and crawled on him myself and as I did I knocked over the wine. “KATE!,” Dad screamed, his insides ripping apart. “Look what you’ve done. Can’t you ever be more careful?”
The image of Camille stood in front of him, her arm reaching down to him. Her ginger hair blowing across her face, her eyes pleading her love, their happiness.
“Kate, look what you’ve done,” Mom said, repeating Dad. Jane and Julia chimed in with Mom. Mom rushed out with the chocolate-wafer icebox cake and a sponge. She was all over the place mopping up the spilled wine. Mom knew how close she’d come to losing him. She was trying to keep his secret, ironing their life back to something flat and clean that she could handle.
“I was only playing,” I cried.
“It’s all right,” Dad said. He patted my hair down and pulled me into his arms and hugged me. It was a hard hug, like I could go away. He smelled of sweat because he hadn’t showered. Usually we’d never let him near us after exercising, he’d smell so bad.
“Come on girls, your father’s tired. Let him be,” Mom said. Dad looked up at the moon. We nestled into him, gently, trying, still, to pry attention out of him. A little exhausted because it was so late and the evening, despite the storm, was that hot summer kind, swelling with a new storm that could break just as easily as it could pass. Crickets hummed in chorus with the tree frogs. All the windows were lit in the house, and it glowed. Mom knelt down and sliced the cake. Her hair was a perfect mess of curls and she wore navy slacks and a short-sleeved, white cotton shirt that buttoned up the front. Her cheeks were gently burned from the sun. She talked about our plans for the trip to Maine and Nova Scotia, trying to excite Dad. We used forks and knives to eat the fried chicken and the cake. All of us a little nervous, waiting for this day, this week, this month to pass.
After a while Camille would have passe
d. A trial. A glitch in life. And life would have settled down again, normal again. The same. I would have grown up in the pink room. Julia in the blue. Jane in the yellow. The three of us growing bigger until we were all the same size. Each year a pattern, a diagram to get through. Very little memorable. Mom would have gardened and continued to have made us clothes. We would have all succeeded in school. No teachers taking us into their offices to talk about home. No mothers canceling play dates because they feared divorce themselves. Years made different by nannies from foreign countries. By vacations we’d take. By my father’s appointments and scientific discoveries. Normal. We would have been the Loves, the Fitzpatricks, the Campbells, the Coopers.
“How dull,” Mom would say later, sighing as if relieved.
♦
On July 20, 1969, two men landed on the moon. All year long in science class we discussed, read and saw films about the first landing and all the others that followed. We read the papers. We did reports. Discussed it so much and there were so many landings that after awhile it took a tragedy for people to pay attention.
On the day the men landed on the moon, fourteen-year-old Jeffrey Ward was voted Mr. Teenager 1969 and was sent to Saigon to ‘assess’ the war as a guest of the South Vietnamese government. For breakfast we had cottage cheese pancakes, light like souffles. I drenched mine in maple syrup and then complained I couldn’t eat them because they were too sweet. David Robb of Missoula, Montana was in Stockholm, Sweden, after defecting from the U.S. Army. On the planet a woman was being raped every ten seconds. I was still mad from the night before, when Mom had made me eat liver and I’d refused. She’d sent me to the laundry room as punishment and I’d had to stay in there until I finished the liver. I hid it at the bottom of a hamper filled with dirty clothes. Many Americans had long since traveled the distance to the moon – 238,857 miles. It turned out the liver had stayed in the hamper for weeks, smelling up the place. The dirty laundry was still dirty, and by the time the liver was found no one cared that I’d hid it. Every twenty seconds someone was dying of starvation. On a sunny summer Sunday Americans covered 340 square miles of their own flesh with suntan lotions. My sisters and I ran through a sprinkler on our front lawn, waiting for our father to come home. Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was infested with a slimy, rust-colored jellyfish called Cyanea capillata. Brian Cain drove up our driveway mad drunk, flailing a letter. My father and Camille were in Dad’s white VW driving north, believing it was the right thing to do. Two men were walking on the moon. My sisters and I were sent to the laundry room. The liver didn’t smell yet. Hubert Humphrey was on a bear hunt in Russia; the Mets were in Montreal splitting a double-header with the Expos; Randy Geise of Keyport, Washington, was sailing a bathtub to Vancouver in the Great Canadian Bathtub Race; the Henry Fords were cruising the Aegean Sea; many millions around the world were listening to the television and radio; three wars were being fought – Vietnam, Middle East, Nigeria; Mom was trying to calm Brian Cain; Reverend Edward Zeiser read of the miracle of the loaves and fishes to eighty-five parishioners in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. But his sermon focused on the astronauts: “Through these three men in orbit today, Jesus is announcing that something of tremendous value is about to be offered – the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Bright Angel Time Page 23
