The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  If she laid bare her travails, would the fact of her seeking advice render them speechless? At first, definitely. But they’d hide their surprise, and she’d be hugged tight by them all. Her father would say, “What can we do? Do you need money?” Her mother would say, “Let’s sit. We’ll delve into it deeply, locate the roots together.” Phoebe would lose herself in the story of Valentine’s marriage proposal, which Camille would relay as off-the-cuff, lobbed the week he left, though the proposal was serious, and then Phoebe would be dispirited, if not a little depressed, and acting as if she weren’t. And Simon, he would insist she take up yoga, or cycling, or running, would tell her the best way to get out of her own head was to get sweaty, to funnel her fear into movement.

  A green truck flies past with a dog in the passenger seat, head out the window, russet-colored ears flapping in the current. He reminds Camille of her early childhood, recalled mostly through photographs. The one she’s thinking of was taken in front of the Connecticut house—her young parents laughing as their very young daughters roll on the grass with the little dogs she and Phoebe adored. She can’t believe she doesn’t remember their names. Simon’s not in that picture, was not yet born, not part of their old life, and his absence from that time-faded image makes her think of her own absence, how happy everyone will be when they see her, how happy everyone will be that the family is united when her father is honored. Does she have it in her to unsettle all that domestic pleasure?

  She wishes she had picked up the phone, opened the lines of communication in advance of her return. She could have called Phoebe, given her a warning that would have spread, that all was not right with her. She had considered the notion, then discarded it, because Phoebe would have wanted to talk about what everyone was planning to wear tonight. And she hadn’t wanted to hear her sister’s lawyer voice, used when she means, I know what’s best for you, telling Camille, as she often has in the past, that she wasn’t to wear anything purchased from secondhand shops and flea markets, which constitutes Camille’s entire wardrobe. “Go buy yourself something no one else has worn before, something wonderfully sexy. Purchase the best you can afford in a luxurious fabric with subtle draping, and a great pair of heels.” That’s what her sister would have said, which would have smacked Camille on the head with the truth that her sartorial challenges are the least of her problems.

  Phoebe, of course, will be dressed in something expensively incomparable, highlighting her effortless radiance. All of her family will be dressed to the nines, every one of them imbued with an intuitive sense of what goes with what. She did not inherit that particular Tabor gene, but she made an effort this time. She will be wearing a white satin suit, trousers and jacket, a designer hand-me-down from the hostess of that last awful cocktail party, who said, “This will be great on you,” and when Camille at first declined, Marni said, “Listen, no way I’m ever getting back to my prepregnancy weight, so either you take it or it goes with all the rest to Goodwill.” Camille had taken it. And then spent money she shouldn’t have spent on the kind of high heels Phoebe would approve of, bought spanking new. When she tried the outfit on Thursday, she wasn’t repulsed by what she saw in the mirror, but she knows what will happen later today: she’ll be dressed and Phoebe will come into her old bedroom and tilt her head and put a manicured finger to her mouth and say, “It’s not bad, but it’s not really you. Let’s see if Mom has something better.”

  It’s not Phoebe’s fault that she likes to help, but Camille will feel doubly the failure, a child led by the hand and shown a range of choices in Roma’s closet. Attending the gala for her father outfitted by her sister in her mother’s clothes, that alone speaks to a life that has jumped the tracks.

  Camille shakes her head. She’s floundering, but she can stand firm in this one way, refuse all kindly suggestions, proudly wear the suit, view it as a small victory. The only kind available to her these days, other than those that occur inside the lilac walls of the hospice, helping those truly at the end of their roads.

  How she wishes she were back in the Trobriand Islands, inhabiting herself fully. Everything was easier there. She was focused, smart, happy, and energetic. Fun to be around. She spoke Kilivila like a native, surprising everyone with her fluency. She wore shorts and tees and sandals, hiking boots in the bush, flippers in the water when she explored the coral atolls with the islanders. She helped with the annual yam crop, tended to the gardens, to the taro, the sweet potatoes, the leafy greens and beans, the squashes. She split coconuts; she ate raw sugarcane. She sat cross-legged on fertile ground, on green grass, at the edge of sugarcane fields, surrounded by Trobrianders, of all ages, of both genders, listening to everything they wanted to tell her, finding ways to get them to tell her everything else she desired to know. At the cracked feet of the old medicine women she learned about the magic spells they created for whoever came to them in good faith and with pure hearts, paid for with dried banana leaves. Magic spells for controlling the weather, for finding love, for increasing beauty, for attaining carving expertise, for growing the biggest yams, for building canoes, for sailing the ocean safely. Spells considered personal property, passed down from one generation to the next, along with the land they worked, with its coconut and areca palm trees, the gardens they tilled, the shells they collected from the beaches, the dried-banana-leaf wealth they stored away. She would like to be back on Kiriwina, on Kaileuna, on Kitava, or on Vakuta, asking one of those wise and wizened old women to conjure her a whole lot of magic spells. Spells that would solve all of her problems. Incantations, chants, herbs, sacred oils, anything, everything, perhaps even just a warm hand on her head.

  Camille finds herself smiling. It’s strange, but simply thinking about those magic spells has lightened her mood, cleared the bramble from her brain. She knows now that when she enters the kingdom of home, she will do so with bravery, with love in her heart, and her life under wraps.

  TEN

  LUCY HAS SPLASHED AROUND in the pool and Isabel has listened to Elena read her a story and Simon has packed and everyone has eaten birds in a nest, and now the trunk of the car is filled with his and Elena’s small black carry-on bags and his daughters’ tiny suitcases awash in butterflies and glittery flowers. But there is a ruckus in the house—Isabel again insisting on wearing her purple tutu and Elena having none of it. Simon hears Elena’s pitched voice and Isabel’s crying and, out here, Lucy’s squeals as she competes in a footrace with what might be an invented, invisible friend, running back and forth from the front door, over the grass, to him at the car in the driveway.

  She screeches to a halt and flings her golden downy arms around him and looks up into his face. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy …” And he knows she won’t stop saying Daddy until he does something, adjusts this stuck mode she’s in. Lucy with her repetitions of words, Isabel with her tutu, his children already know how to dig in for the long haul.

  An old woman in a red tracksuit and matching red sun visor is huffing up their steep street, her old leashed dog behind, trotting hard to keep up. Lucy peers around Simon to watch, then looks up at him again and begins, “Doggy, doggy, doggy, doggy, doggy …” and it goes on even after owner and animal have disappeared around the bend in the road. Lucy often speaks like a child far older than she is, amazing both her parents by articulating abstract thoughts, but this repetitive game of hers can drive him loony.

  “Honey, why don’t you go find out what’s keeping Mommy and Isabel.”

  “No,” Lucy says, leaping back, folding her arms over her chest, staring him down. “Belly is dumbdumbdumb. I told her what to wear, but she doesn’t listen.”

  Belly, the name Lucy calls her younger sister when she wants it understood how grown-up she is in comparison.

  “We’ll go together,” Simon says, and then Elena is framed in the front door, holding Isabel, who is dressed in a purple dress and purple sandals with bows, her dark hair in a jiggling top-of-the-head ponytail, her face tearstained, clutching the
purple tutu. Elena gives him a rueful look: the tutu, Isabel’s version of a security blanket, will be joining them on this trip.

  Forty minutes after he hoped to be on the road, the girls are in their car seats, the kiddie music they adore, like nails on a chalkboard to their parents, is on low, and they are heading down the curves to the flats. He likes the ivy tendrils and ice plants spilling from the hills, chosen to avert disastrous rain runoff and potential mudslides, the heavy boughs of tall trees arching lacily over the narrow street, the sun spilling through the foliage, the oft-patched road. They’ve just passed his favorite house, a white cottage covered in bougainvillea, blooming rose bushes heavily scattered about. It has a storybook quality to it that their own house lacks despite its age, with its squared-off rooms, its sliding glass doors that are not original. He knows the white cottage is deceptive. It looks quaint, but it’s five bedrooms and five and a half baths, has a large pool with a waterfall, and the owners have lived there for twenty-five years. He tracks prices in their neighborhood, houses for sale, houses in escrow, enjoys looking at the floor plans posted online, knows everything about that white cottage. At some point, they’ll either have to expand their own house—building up, a second floor, would be the only choice—or move. It’s fine for now, with the girls so small, but when they’re teenagers, filling every room with their emotions, it’s going to be a disaster. But that’s in the future, and at least he called a guy named Fred to come Monday morning, make the crack in the ceiling disappear before everything comes falling down.

  Gas, he thinks and peers at the gauge, hoping Elena filled up her car. She doesn’t always remember. The last time they went to Palm Springs, in June for Roma’s sixty-eighth birthday, Elena hadn’t done it, and the girls had been screaming, and the machine kept refusing to accept his card, and by the time the tank was filled and he was back in the car, he and Elena weren’t speaking to each other. That whole trip a waste of valuable, hard-to-find conversational time. But the tank is miraculously full, which means they don’t have to stop, which means when the girls fall asleep, as they do cruising the freeway, he and Elena will be able to talk, the first time in months that they are both in the same car with a couple hours of quiet driving ahead of them.

  At the other end, Agapanthus Lane and the house in which he grew up. Even before their daughters were born, his mother led them to the lovely guest room, with the en suite bathroom and the king bed, but he always wishes for the bedroom that was his from infancy on, where he sprawled out when home from university and law school for holidays and several weeks each summer. He’s never had the guts to say to his parents, “Let’s switch the twin beds in my old room for the big bed in the guest room. We’ll put the girls in the guest and I can sleep where I once did for years and years. Let me really come home.” No matter how long Phoebe and Camille have been gone, they burst into the house and toss their belongings into bedrooms that have always been theirs, still imprinted with their teenage books and school awards, although the furniture has been replaced, is now white and modern. He endures an internal temper tantrum walking into the room intended for visitors, that holds nothing of him in the air, or the closet, or the shelves. It makes him feel like the interloper he sometimes considered himself to be—the youngest child, the last child, the only boy, an oops, he has often thought—those eight years between him and Phoebe, six between him and Camille. The only one born in Palm Springs. During high school, he used to climb up to the flat roof and sit with his legs hanging over the edge, drinking a Gatorade, looking out at the sunburned land, with its desert wildlife requiring no human intervention, the isolated stretches of emerald golf courses, the mountains off in the distance, imagining the reaction of his parents and sisters to this environment, so different from the bucolic Eastern town in which they had once lived, the house he has seen only in pictures, a giant maple outside the living room windows, snowstorms in the winter, snowmen in the front yard, games by the fireplace, the air tangy and blue with cold.

  Enough, he thinks. He will not allow himself these petulant feelings today, not this weekend. Not with Harry’s induction, not with his own phenomenal news about the ILA conference. He is a grown man no longer in need of his childhood space.

  The traffic light turns green and Simon accelerates up the onramp, pulls onto the freeway, moves into the fast lane. Elena checks the backseat, then snaps off the kiddie music and says, “They’re already asleep. Let’s talk about Colombia. First, what do we do with the kids?”

  Simon glances at Elena and she’s smiling at him. Something has shaken loose this morning; they seem back on the same page. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. Not who can take proper care of our precious children, but what do we do with them.”

  Elena’s smile disappears. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  He was kidding. She knows she’s a terrific mother and knows he thinks she’s a terrific mother, so why can’t she laugh about something all parents occasionally say? Better not to ask again about her losing her sense of humor. Better to take the high road, carry the conversation forward.

  “Maybe we should come back to Palm Springs, leave them with Roma and Harry for the ten days?” he suggests. “I wonder if we can fly out from there, come back the same way?”

  “We’d have to backtrack with a connecting flight out of LA, but that’s not a big deal. The big deal is if we put Lucy in that kinder-readiness program, she’ll miss a week of it. So are we enrolling her or forgetting about it and she’ll just start kindergarten next year?”

  This has been a regular topic all summer. Simon won’t say this morning what he keeps saying—that it’s Elena’s decision, since she’s the one home with the kids. For months, they’ve batted around whether Elena is ready for this part of Lucy’s childhood to end. If Lucy’s ready. She’s nearly reading her favorite books on her own, but reverts in some ways for reasons they haven’t been able to figure out—a thumb in her mouth, baby talk, extra-long naps several afternoons in a row; a couple of times she’s wet her bed in the middle of the night when she’s been diaper-free since Elena was five months pregnant with Isabel.

  “What happens if we enroll her this year but she starts late?”

  “I don’t know,” Elena says. “Do five-year-olds form immediate friendships? Would a latecomer be ostracized? I’d hate that for her.”

  He doesn’t know the answers to those questions, but Roma would, and he can’t understand why Elena hasn’t called and asked for her input; they’ve talked so many times about reaching out to their own personal psychologist who specializes in toddlers, children, and teens. “I’ll ask my mother this weekend,” he says. “She’ll give us some guidance.”

  When Elena says nothing, Simon changes gears. “Assuming Roma says Lucy starting late isn’t a problem, or we decide to hold off on school until next year, what do you think about giving the girls quality time with their grandparents while we’re gone?”

  “Sure,” Elena says. “But will Roma and Harry be able to handle them? Read to Isabel in the mornings, make sure they don’t drown in the pool, get them both to eat a healthy breakfast?”

  “Phoebe, Camille, and I survived, none of us drowned or starved, so I’ll say yes to that.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she says again, this time in a lighter voice. Then, “It’s just that we’ve never—”

  “I know,” Simon says, and he does know. They’ve never left their daughters, or rather, Elena has never left their daughters anywhere overnight without her, which includes with their maternal grandparents and great-grandparents, who live in Los Angeles, too. Their honeymoon was the last vacation they took alone. In the beginning, she joked that motherhood had grounded her as it hadn’t grounded him—but that joke, less frequently raised by Elena these days, feels sharper and stabs deeper when she does. A few weeks ago, when he suggested hiring the nanny they can’t really afford to care for Isabel if they put Lucy in that readiness program, Elena said, “What’s the use right now? I can�
��t travel somewhere and back in four hours.”

  “So,” she says. “I don’t think Medellín has become a really hot tourist spot yet. While you’re busy, I could explore the city, see if I can discover a fresh angle for an article, try to sell it to one of my old editors.”

  “That would be great,” he says, with enthusiastic surprise. When they’d talked about whether he might receive the ILA invitation this year, he’d suggested exactly what she’s just proposed, and she shot him down, said, “Christ, Simon, leave it alone.”

  “Okay, so what do we do with the kids?”

  A small laugh from Elena this time. “My parents wouldn’t be able to manage the girls and the abuelitos, so let’s see how your parents react to the idea of ten days with their granddaughters. Well, actually, wouldn’t it be twelve? A travel day on each end, the ten days of the conference? Let’s suggest we’ll hire someone to care for them while your parents are working, to take them on adventures, sightseeing, that kind of thing.”

  He can’t see his daughters lasting through even an hour of sightseeing, but what does it matter if Elena is considering at last leaving them, if it means actually making the trip to Colombia together.

  “Maybe the girl my mom hired for tonight will work out and we can arrange everything while we’re there.”

  “What if your parents say a few days is okay, but twelve is too long? What do we do then?”

  “They won’t,” Simon says. “They’ll view time alone with their granddaughters as a gift, without the meddling of their son and daughter-in-law.”

  “Not very funny. But what if they do?”

  “Then we’ll figure something else out. But they’ll agree, Elena. I promise.”

  He needs to change the subject before Elena questions whether Roma will alter the schedule she has the girls on. “What do you know about Colombia?”