Swim Back to Me

by Ann Packer

  “Dan, you’re way ahead of yourself.”

  He looks down his giant, beaky nose at me. “Excuse me for having the bad manners to tell my daughter how I feel.” He glares, and I can’t decide what to say next. If I were he, I’d try to bump him out of it with a family joke—his joke, which is itself a reaction to his mother, the legendary Moomie Horowitz (as if there could be two Moomies, but that is what we called her), who was one of the great complainers of all time. If dissatisfaction was a virtue in our family, endless talking about it was to take unforgivable advantage of one’s good fortune, and whenever my brother or I whined or moaned about something, my father would tell us: Beware the family curse. Beware the Horowitz horror!

  We face each other, I perched on the bed, he on the chair. He is, in fact, getting on: his bright blue eyes are hazed by cataract clouds, and his hair, once as red and curly as mine, is beige and cut so short that it clings to his scalp in tiny disheveled patches, looking like nothing so much as a helmet of brown rice. He will fall ill someday, whether he’s ill now or not, and someday he will be gone. I have imagined the time after, with its cavern of sadness, and I know that even his most irritating foibles will acquire, in recollection, a kind of charm, and that grief will have its way with me time and again.

  I say, “I’m sorry you’re scared.”

  He shrugs, and I go to the window and watch the Australians in the hot tub, their bodies so submerged I can’t tell whether they’ve taken the clothing option or not. They are talking and smiling, and at one point the husband puts his hand flat on top of the wife’s head, an oddly tender gesture. They look to be in their sixties; at breakfast this morning they said they’d both just retired and were taking their first ever trip away from Australia.

  A mile from here, my brother is alone in his apartment—doing what, I don’t know. How do you spend your wedding day if you are one of the sweetest and most solitary people on the planet? He is a man so overwhelmed by his own heart that he arranged a sabbatical the last time he fell in love, an entire year away, effectively guaranteeing that his beloved would meet someone else during his absence and move on. It’s extraordinary to me that he is getting married.

  “Maybe if you went to the doctor with me,” my father says, and I turn and tell him I’d be happy to—which I’d have said five hours ago if he’d only asked. I suggest we both lie down for a while, and when he agrees I return to my room.

  The next thing I know, I’m waking in a strange bed to the sounds of my mother on the other side of the wall. I hear the zip of her suitcase, the slide and clatter of plastic hangers moving along a bar. If my father is awake, he can hear this, too. I last saw her about eighteen months ago, when I drove from Western Massachusetts, where I live, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where she’d just finished remodeling her cottage. On that particular trip I didn’t stop in Hartford to see my father—I visit at least once a month, often more—but even so I felt what I always feel, that in the most literal of ways, as in all others, he is between us.

  I wash my face before I go knock on her door. We chat for a few minutes, exchanging travel stories, marveling at the weather. She tells me I look great, and I tell her she looks great, which she does, in her proudly unkempt way: her nearly white hair hangs past her shoulders, thick and flyaway; and she’s unapologetically frumpy in a mid-calf calico skirt and running shoes. She gave up vanity the way other people give up sugar, and her arms and hips and stomach are as soft and plump as bread dough.

  “Fat, anyway,” she says cheerfully. “I hope I won’t embarrass Peter.”

  “He can’t wait to see you,” I say, which is surely true, though not something he said to me.

  “Where’s Dan?”

  I point at the wall dividing her room from my father’s. “He’s a little under the weather,” I say in a low voice.

  Her face betrays nothing, neither concern nor skepticism; for thirty-five years she has been the very embodiment of the correct way to behave with your children after a divorce. In my twenties, I tried to get her to open up: “It’s been ten years,” I said. “I’m an adult, we can talk.” This was just after my divorce, and I guess I wanted to dish with her, but she wouldn’t budge.

  “What’s Cressida like?” she says now, backing up and sitting on the bed. She puts her hands together and holds them between her knees, a gesture I’ve known forever.

  I fill my mother in about Cressida and her family and then move on to last night’s party, leaning a little harder than I should on how welcoming everyone was and how much fun we all had. “They’re big hikers,” I say. “After the thing tomorrow they’re going to take us on a hike.” This, too, is unkind: I happen to know that my mother is on an early flight—booked, she claims, before she knew there would be a brunch.

  She smiles, ignoring or maybe not even noticing what I’ve really said. She tells me that last time she was here she and Peter spent a glorious afternoon at Mount Tam. “It was fantastic,” she says. “I still remember the view.”

  From my father’s room comes a loud cough, a cough that could have been produced for one reason only, to remind us of his existence. I don’t think he can hear what we’re saying, just the sound of it, but I have no doubt he’s using every gram of concentration to determine from our pauses and cadences how we are getting along. With him, I generally pretend that my mother and I are closer than in fact we are, whereas with her I pretend that he and I are not as close as we are, or rather that we have one of those healthy parent-child relationships characterized by mutual affection and respect, not mutual suspicion and resentment. I think I’ve done a better job convincing him than her.

  “So,” she says, glancing at her watch, “we’ve got half an hour?”

  I look at my watch and say, “Wow, that’s right.”

  And here is more pretending: we are both acutely aware of the time, the strain, the welcome need to part so we can dress.

  At 5:35 I leave my room and go to the front hall, where I told both my parents I would meet them. I made sure to say we would all three be meeting—no surprises—but even so I’ve been careful to arrive first. While I wait, the Australians appear in matching blue sweatshirts, each with the word “VICTORY” in giant letters across the front. “We’re going to a baseball game,” the husband says, rhyming “game” with “lime.” “In our team colors.” “Our football team,” the wife says, and then together they say, “Soccer, that is.” They laugh and she says, “Have a lovely time at your brother’s wedding. September’s the best time to get married in Australia—it’s our spring, you know.”

  They head off, and I think of my own short-lived marriage, which also began in September, at my fiancé’s family’s reform temple in suburban New Jersey, since I had neither synagogue nor intact family of my own. We had met in college, broken up after graduation, and then found each other again and mistaken familiarity for love. After we married we had some fun traveling together, but once we tried to settle down I began picking at him over tiny annoyances—because the big annoyance, the fact that he wasn’t paying enough attention to me, was too unreasonable for me to recognize at that point, let alone communicate. When I wasn’t picking at him I was picking at the rest of mankind, going on and on about some slight, a minor social disappointment, an achievement inadequately rewarded. I was twenty-five, I thought it was just a matter of time before people shaped up and started acting as I wanted. Such is the lot of the narcissist’s child, to inherit her parent’s umbrage over the world’s indifference.

  And here is the narcissist, looking dapper in a light brown suit and paisley necktie, and loafers with tassels. “She’s a little late,” he says, glancing at his watch.

  “A minute,” I say. “Actually forty-five seconds.”

  “Well, but she’s not here yet.”

  “You look spiffy.”

  He adjusts the knot of his necktie, smooths his lapels. “And she’s …”

  “Great,” I say.

  We stand here for an eon of seconds, un
til my mother’s footsteps sound, then we both turn to look at her. She has pinned up her hair and put on lipstick and a sapphire caftan, and she looks marvelous. I hear my father suck in a mouthful of air. “Joanie,” he says. “Always a pleasure.”

  She kisses the air above his shoulder. “What an occasion, hmmm?”

  I always think I can finesse these situations—the last was maybe seven years ago, when I received an award at the college where I teach—but in the event I am clumsy and fall back on false hurry. “Right, let’s get going,” I say, and I leave the house ahead of them and have the car doors open before either has made it to the sidewalk.

  The community center parking lot is only half full, and we find Cressida’s father and brother greeting people at the entrance. During the car ride, my father went on and on to me about the book he’s reading, offering an elaborate critique of its faux Faulknerian dreaminess and moral vacancy, and my mother, once I’ve introduced her, says she wants to find Peter and vanishes.

  “She’s certainly haughty,” my father says.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  Some people I recognize from the party last night come up to say hello, and we talk to them, and then to the next group, and soon it is time to go inside. In our absence this afternoon, the rec room was even further transformed, and it is stunning now, with gauzy drapes covering the walls and dozens of flower arrangements creating a lovely chaos of color.

  The programs are lying on the chairs. They have Peter’s and Cressida’s names in calligraphy on the front, along with today’s date. My father opens his and flips through the pages. “They’ve got e. e. cummings,” he says. “And Rumi.”

  “Could be worse,” I say, knowing he wishes it were.

  My mother appears and sits with us, sliding her bag, a large silver brocade satchel that’s oddly capacious for a social event, under her chair. She tells us she found Peter standing with some of his graduate students in the courtyard. “He looks beautiful,” she says, eliciting an offended sigh from my father, I don’t know why.

  “Did you get a chance to talk?” I ask, remembering the morning of my wedding, when my mother told me she wanted time alone with me and then said in the gravest voice imaginable that her only regret about leaving my father was the message it sent me and Peter about the impermanence of love. “The thing is,” she said, “it’s up to you, how long it lasts. You get to choose, the two of you together.” These words, despite their wisdom, did not in the end make a difference for me and my ex-husband, but I imagine they might for Peter and Cressida, if at some point a difference needs to be made.

  “He was with other people,” she says. “I just gave him a hug.”

  Then Peter appears before us, looking, in fact, quite beautiful, in a greenish gray suit and a soft white shirt with no collar. He is tall and skinny, my brother, with high cheekbones from our mother and our father’s narrow shoulders. His hands are at his sides, and, holding his arms steady, he looks at us and swings his fingers up and down in an almost imperceptible wave. He got his hair cut today; his ears are pink and vulnerable. We rise from our seats to watch Cressida and her father come up the aisle, and when I look back at Peter, I see that he is wearing the kind of giant grin that just takes over sometimes, when nothing exists but how happy you are.

  For the next several minutes tears leak from my eyes, and I’m grateful for the tissues my mother passes me, a fresh one as soon as she sees that the last is sodden. On my other side, my father simply lets his face get wet, and finally a tear splashes onto his program, briefly magnifying a few letters before they thicken and begin to slide down the page.

  The reception is at the back of the room, spilling into the courtyard, and my father and I mill around with wine and then wine plus appetizers passed on trays by a small army of teenage girls. He stays at my elbow, volunteering very little of his own conversation but occasionally annotating mine with opinions and contempt. It’s not till he heads off to use the bathroom that I search out my mother, whom I find with Cressida’s mother, the two of them clasping hands.

  “I didn’t know your mother was an artist,” Cressida’s mother says when she sees me. “She’s so talented.” To my mother she says, “You’ve got to show her the one of Cress and Peter.”

  I understand now why my mother brought such a big bag: she’s been sketching. It’s true, what Cressida’s mother said: she is very talented. When I was young, hardly a guest came over whom she didn’t capture in a quick sketch, and she drew us—Peter and my father and me—over and over again. After she left him, my father spent days studying the portraits hanging around the house, as if what she’d seen in each of us might reveal whatever it was he’d missed in her. Then one day he took them all down and put them in a large envelope, and for the next few years, until he had the house painted so he could sell it and move somewhere smaller, there were shadow portraits everywhere, faint gray smudges outlining empty rectangles.

  My mother hands her sketchpad to me, opened to one of the newlyweds. Cressida is lovely, but in this drawing my mother has discovered something else, and it’s a revelation. Cressida and Peter are standing alone together, in front of one of the panels of gauze, and her fingertips are curled onto the waistband of his pants, a gesture not of sexual play or possession, but of reassurance. With her hair spiraling past her shoulders and her pretty collarbones reflecting the diffuse light, she looks at my brother with what I can describe only as faith.

  I flip the pages, see sketches of Cressida’s delighted mother and distracted father, of her brother pulling at the collar of his shirt. Then suddenly there I am, together with my father: we’re standing in a corner, each of us with a glass of wine held bouquet-style, at low chest level with both hands. He looks sad and dazed, and I look—how can I describe this?—like a not unattractive middle-aged woman with overly curly hair who has just sucked on a wedge of lemon.

  “God in heaven,” I say.

  “What?” my mother replies.

  “Who’s this charmer?”

  Cressida’s mother has turned to talk to someone else, and my mother moves to my side for a better look. “You look lovely. Beautiful and serious.”

  I hand the sketchpad back to her.

  “You do,” she says, looking down at the sketch, “see, through here,” and she runs her finger along the charcoal lines of my forehead and temple, bisected by a short coil of hair.

  “Listen,” I say, “I should find Dan,” and I leave and head for the hallway to the bathrooms, thinking I shouldn’t’ve just walked away but also that she won’t mind, may in fact prefer it, because now she can continue sketching. She’s like a shy teenager with a guitar: her sketchbook helps her connect with other people while keeping her at a safe, busy distance.

  I run into my father as he’s leaving the men’s room. He sees me and says, “Red meat, if you want to know, and speaking of which: Are they having a real dinner? Because I can’t stand around eating things off toothpicks all night. It’s a wedding, shouldn’t there be a skimpy piece of salmon with my name on it somewhere?” I open my mouth to respond, but he continues: “It’s not like they’re poor. That house was worth a million if it was worth a penny. What about a cold bread roll? What about salad with candied walnuts and too much balsamic vinaigrette?”

  “It’s not a sit-down kind of reception,” I say.

  “Obviously.”

  Back in the rec room, he stops walking and falls into silence. I stand beside him, aware that he could be on the verge of an unpleasant slide.

  “Nice what they did with the room,” I say.

  He grimaces. “Where’s Joanie? Has she left already? I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “She’s around. I was just talking to her.”

  “And why are there no tables? All those chairs from earlier, what are we supposed to do—go sit in rows?”

  “Dan.”

  “What?”

  This could be a mistake, but I say it anyway: “Beware the Horowitz horror.”

&n
bsp; For a long moment it could go either way, but at last he grins, and I relax a little. He chuckles and says, “That made you laugh, you and Peter. But mostly you. Do you know, I used to think of you as my child and Peter as your mother’s? Not that you should tell him that, of course.”

  “Not to worry.”

  “I feel bad about it. Do you think he knew?” He gives me a sidelong look. “Never mind, he knew, he knew. Ah, God, regret.” He falls silent again, and I think it would be a good idea to move on, into the party, out to the courtyard—somewhere. But just as I’m about to suggest this, he proclaims:

  Things said or done long years ago,

  Or things I did not do or say

  But thought that I might say or do,

  Weigh me down, and not a day

  But something is recalled,

  My conscience or my vanity appalled.

  “Yeats?” I say.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?”

  “Such a lovely view of maturity.”

  “But it’s true, not a day goes by. Which is worse, do you suppose?”

  “Which what is worse?”

  “Appalled conscience or appalled vanity?”

  I think for a moment. “Appalled conscience for me. For you it’s appalled vanity.”

  He barks out a laugh. “Well, that appalls my vanity right there.”

  “And that,” I say, “appalls my conscience.”

  He laughs at that, and I begin to laugh, too, and it takes root: we’re giggling like children. We laugh and laugh, and my father flaps his hand in front of his face as if he were trying to put out a fire. Then I have a memory, from the year we spent in California. My father had been denied tenure at Yale and had a temporary appointment in the English Department at Stanford. I was thirteen. One evening shortly after we arrived, the four of us went into San Francisco and happened to stroll past a fancy French restaurant just as a well-dressed couple came out and were about to step into the backseat of a waiting taxi. Before they could get into the car, the door to the restaurant opened again, and a waiter rushed out, calling after them and holding in his upturned palm a tinfoil swan. “Your gâteau,” he cried, and the couple took the package and thanked him and got into the taxi. Nothing, a nothing moment, slightly amusing, but for the entire rest of the evening and the weeks or maybe months following, that scene split us into parts: my father and me into sick hilarity, my mother into eye-rolling exasperation, my brother into bored indifference. “Your gâteau” with an empty palm held skyward—that was all it took, one of us saying it to the other, my father to me or I to him, and each time we fell into great convulsions of laughter.