Family Reunion

by Caroline B. Cooney

  I could not believe this. “What did they jeer at you for?”

  “Getting married at sixteen. Dropping out of school. Being a failure. Bringing embarrassment and rage to our families. Going on welfare.”

  “Daddy! You were on welfare?”

  “Just for a little while. Celeste and I had absolutely no idea how to be grown-ups. So we quit trying. She went to live with her aunt in Chicago, and I went to New York and lived with a bunch of young guys as worthless as I was and didn't make the slightest attempt to be adult again until I met your mother.”

  … we talked for hours, Jo. I love hearing stories about when Daddy was little. Of course, he wasn't little during these stories—he was a teenager—but he sounds so little. And so dumb. Every story he told, I wanted to go, “But Daddy, how could you have done so many things wrong in such a short time?” Anyway, he was pretty set against my going anywhere with Toby. But he didn't want to refuse me either, so he's letting me go. But he's not going to meet Toby. He says life is emotional enough without that.

  So here's my schedule for the next fifteen minutes:

  send this to you

  telephone Mother and tell her I'm visiting her, and that Carolyn is coming too, although we haven't asked Aunt Maggie yet, but I figure if we already have Mother's permission, we're set, so you get started on that

  drive with Toby

  Toby was a good driver. We drove all over the countryside, he gripping the wheel and me over by my window. He talked on and on about mothers and fathers. I was ready to talk about boys and girls, but Toby gave no sign that he was tired of the parental subject. “My grandparents wanted me to bring you over so they could meet you,” he confided, “but I said maybe later.”

  “Why do they want to meet me?” I said cautiously.

  “Because if your father had stayed married to my mother, you'd be their granddaughter.”

  “Genes don't work that way,” I pointed out. “Still, it's nice to know they liked Daddy. I thought nobody wanted Celeste and my father to get married.”

  “Nobody wanted them to get married at sixteen. But other than that, it was fine.”

  We broke up laughing. “Keep steering,” I said. “Or we'll get killed. Too much laughing on the part of the driver is against the rules.”

  “You know, only people like us really know how to laugh,” said Toby. “I know this girl who is another Perfect, just like your aunt Maggie, and she takes everything so seriously.”

  “Poor Aunt Maggie. She's so broken up about Brett.”

  “I don't blame her. Brett is being a jerk. But you know, sometimes I think in families where nothing has ever gone wrong, when even the littlest thing does go wrong, the families collapse. Brett could always be pretty good at stuff without half trying. He was never the best, because for that you actually have to try. But he could always hang out with the best, whether it was in golf or math. So he gets behind the wheel of a car, and he's a terrible driver, and whoever wanted to admit to being a terrible driver? Brett never seems able to tell where the edge of his car is, which is key if you want to miss other people's cars. So Brett keeps having accidents and almost hits people and his father takes away the car and Brett's so mad he won't stay home. Of course, he doesn't get mad at his father, he gets mad at his mother, who had nothing to do with the whole car issue. So he's just being a spoiled brat. Don't worry about him.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. I figured I had so many worthwhile people to worry about, why give Brett worrying space? Let Miranda worry about Brett.

  “Listen,” said Toby.

  I listened.

  He didn't say anything else.

  We both laughed. Giggled, almost. I hadn't been around an older boy who laughed like that. He was really nervous, or that particular sound wouldn't come out. “I'm listening,” I said.

  “I'm not ready to talk yet.”

  “Okay, then I won't listen.”

  Toby cleared his throat. “My mother is a basket case. I phoned her to say that you and I were going for a drive, and she said, 'Charlie's daughter?' ”

  “That's exactly what my father said! 'Celeste's son? Never! No! One thing leads to another!' ”

  Toby said, “My mother is convinced you and I are going to run away and get married.”

  “No, because I won't be sixteen for a year and three quarters, and the running-away tradition is age sixteen.”

  “Rats. We'll have to postpone it, then.”

  …I know, Joanna, this is another encyclopedia-sized e-mail. But there's so much to say, and I like looking at my words on the screen and seeing what I'm thinking. And then Toby said his mother decided she needed him back in Chicago to help out. “Help out how?” I asked Toby, and he said, “Help her not worry that I'm going to make the same mistakes she did.” I said, “Every grown-up in Barrington is obsessive about that. All Aunt Maggie can say is that Brett is making the same mistakes my father did.”

  “Oh, right,” Toby said, “like she didn't have any mistakes in her past that Brett could possibly repeat.”

  And then a funny thing happened, Jo. We were both ready to say good-bye. Good-bye for good. I think maybe we really were related, in a way; at least, we shared a lot. We shared Daddy, a past, secrets—good secrets. Toby was like a cousin or a brother. I'm crazy about Toby and yet I wanted to say good-bye. Plus, of course, I have DeWitt waiting for me out on the lake. I guess it's easier to do anything when somebody is waiting for you.

  I skipped telling Joanna about one part of the good-bye. Toby kissed me. It was a real kiss. A boy-loves-girl kiss. I had never had one before. In one soft touch of my lips to his, I knew why Daddy ran away with Celeste, and I knew why Daddy and Celeste were both afraid to have Toby and me in the same car.

  I wanted to kiss like that all my life … and yet…maybe not with Toby.

  “Next summer?” he said. “Will you be visiting the Perfects again next summer?”

  I nodded. I didn't want to speak. I wanted my lips to remember the kiss. He was very flushed. He turned the air-conditioning in the car up higher and cranked the volume on the radio and drove me back home.

  Home.

  Aunt Maggie and Uncle Todd's, really.

  And yet there is something about relatives that makes their house your house. It was home. It didn't have the wide front porch or the lemonade, but it had family.

  “This is only my third day in Barrington,” I said. “It feels like my third year.”

  Toby laughed. “I've always felt that way about this town. It's so slow. Nothing ever happens.”

  It seemed to me that more had happened in Barrington than usually happened in a year. I felt I had shot right through my father's adolescence and grown up through three or four years of my own.

  We pulled up in front of Aunt Maggie's, but Toby didn't turn into the driveway.

  “Bye,” I said softly.

  He sat on his side of the front seat, looking neither left nor right. He had no intention of making eye contact with me. I was hurt. Then I saw, gathering a few feet away in the driveway, my whole family. Grandma, Aunt Maggie, Carolyn, Annette and Daddy were getting ready to go somewhere in his rental car.

  “You want to meet Daddy?” I said to Toby.

  “Not with that audience.”

  “I don't blame you. I'll hop out. You can drive away and pretend you didn't see them.”

  Toby swallowed. “Okay.”

  I opened my door.

  But it didn't work that easily. What ever does? My father left the group, walked over to us and came around to the driver's side. “Hello, Toby,” he said, bending over and putting out his right hand. “I've always wanted to meet you. It's a privilege.”

  I finished getting out.

  My father said, “I gather it's been a pretty emotional weekend here, Toby. I don't want you to be left with worries or questions. How about you and I go have a hamburger somewhere and talk? Or would that upset your mother?”

  Toby shrugged the way Angus used to when he was
very little, not because he didn't care, but because words were too much for him.

  Daddy got into the passenger seat where I had been and told me he'd be back in an hour or so and why didn't I go shopping with the girls?

  … so the unfair part, Joanna, totally unfair, is that none of us know what Daddy and Toby talked about. I mean of course I do know; I know they talked about Celeste and Daddy's marriage, and divorce, and why he helped her out with expenses all those years ago. But I didn't get to be there and hear his exact words and see if Daddy, who hugs us all the time, hugged Toby. As if Toby could have been his son and, maybe in a tiny distant way, is his son.

  We went shopping instead. Antiquing, actually. A long row of shops in a little village near Barrington, filled with dusty old stuff Annette kept saying would look perfect at the summer house and Aunt Maggie kept saying were too high priced and Grandma kept saying she used to have when she was a little girl. I was megabored. My head was crammed full of thoughts about Daddy and Toby and you and Mother and Jean-Paul and Brett, all of you tumbling and whirling like clothes in a dryer.

  * * *

  In one of the antique shops, I said, “Are you going back to work, Annette? Did you decide?”

  Annette nodded. “Yes. I am. I loved my job, you know. And I was good at it. It's nice to do things you're good at.”

  I fingered the back of the old kitchen chair Annette said she would buy if we had come by car and she had any way to get it to Vermont. It looked to me like an ordinary chair, not worth toting a couple thousand feet, let alone miles.

  We were eye level. Annette is exactly my height. We could share clothes, I thought suddenly. The world seemed full of things I had not yet shared with Annette. “I kind of wish you weren't going back to work,” I said. “It was fun with you home. In Vermont.”

  We drove back to the Preffyns', and there on the sidewalk was Angus walking in the other direction. He didn't see us, and he didn't change his manner even when we slowed down. He wore a hot pink T-shirt he had cut into shreds, so that pink ribbons blew around his chest. He had on baggy orange-and-red shorts. Carolyn had braided string bracelets in purple and black around his wrists, and Angus had not let her cut off the ends, so his wrists dripped cords. He had slashed open the toes on a pair of high-top sneakers Brett had discarded and left in the garage, and the sneakers flapped like mouths with sock tongues, and he was dancing to make them flap even more. He had his leg slung over his shoulder. I had forgotten about the leg. Every time he hopped, the leg kicked him in the behind.

  “How do you live with that?” Aunt Maggie said seriously to Annette.

  Annette said she was getting used to it.

  I said I personally would never get used to it.

  Aunt Maggie began a long story about how my father used to humiliate her when they were about ten and twelve years old. Grandma kept adding details and correcting Aunt Maggie: “No, dear, it was on Elm Street, not Lincoln, remember? In front of the Stevensons' house.”

  Angus spotted us. Immediately his plans changed. He switched direction and began running alongside the car, his leg bouncing against his back, and his sneakers flapping. “Time my speed!” he screamed.

  “The leg is slowing you down!” yelled Carolyn. “Pass it through the window.”

  He passed it through the window, and Carolyn held it. It was good that Annette was driving, because Aunt Maggie would have insisted on a full stop and a careful exchange.

  “How fast am I going?” shrieked Angus, his load lightened.

  “Ninety miles an hour!” screamed Annette.

  “Tell the truth!” shrieked Angus.

  “No,” said Annette. “Nobody else bothers with that around here. Why should I?”

  We crept down the street while Angus ran, and car and boy arrived home together. Carolyn and I changed into our swimsuits and swam in the backyard pool because we didn't want to run into Brett or Miranda. Annette said definitely Carolyn must spend the rest of August with us. We'd be in Vermont for ten days, and then Annette would drive us down to New York and over to Kennedy Airport and put Carolyn and me on the plane for Paris.

  “What?” said Aunt Maggie, who had been left out of this particular loop.

  “I haven't actually called my mother yet,” I said nervously.

  “I called,” said Annette. “She's thrilled. She can't wait to have three girls to play with in Paris. I talked to Joanna, too. She's a little bored on her own. She needs you and Carolyn.”

  “Annette,” I said, “you are awesome. Making that call for me.”

  “I'm not making the next call, Shelley. I think your mother is sitting by the phone. Hoping.”

  A little shiver ran through me.

  My mother, sitting across an ocean. Waiting. Hoping. For me.

  I didn't feel I should be the only one to suffer, though. Let her wait and hope. It was her turn.

  Angus lit the grill so Uncle Todd could broil the chicken that had been marinating. Aunt Maggie put on a huge pot of water to boil for corn on the cob that Grandma had bought at the farmers' market. Daddy woke up from a nap and asked for lemonade.

  I said, “Can we squeeze the lemons?”

  Grandma said she thought she could remember how to cut a lemon in half. So we made lemonade.

  Daddy and I took our lemonades into the shade. “Now the reunion is perfect,” I said. “Real lemonade. If only Brett would come home.”

  Daddy said not all family reunions happened when you wanted them to. That Brett might be home in an hour or a year. I said, “Can't we help?” and Daddy said no, because he had spent a good deal of his life telling his Barrington relations to butt out of his child-rearing decisions, and he could hardly butt into this one. Anyway, said Daddy, Uncle Todd and Brett were doing just fine together. Uncle Todd was taking Brett out for breakfast every morning. Which naturally just made Aunt Maggie feel ten times worse. It was her demand for Perfection that was driving Brett crazy. Things weren't as bad as they seemed.

  “I don't want you to worry, so I'm letting you in on it, Shelley,” said my father. “The fact is that sometimes fathers and sons have to settle things alone, without the women.” He looked at me rather sadly. “And sometimes, mothers and daughters do too. I'm glad you're going to France.”

  “What if it doesn't work? What if I'm still mad at Mommy?”

  “It's only for a week. Go see the Eiffel Tower instead of your mother. But I think it will work. I think you're both ready.”

  “Are you still mad at Mommy?”

  My father was silent for a long time. “Honey, I can go back into the past and be mad at the sixteen-year-old boy who wouldn't do the dishes and threw the plates against the wall instead and made a sixteen-year-old girl so mad she went to live with her aunt. I can go back into the past and be mad at your mother for finding somebody more elegant and worldly than I am. But I love the family I have now. I love the people that you and Joanna and Angus have grown up to be. I love Annette. So mostly, no. I'm not mad. And I don't want you to be mad either, honey. Being mad takes up so much energy. It's hard to be yourself when you're furious all the time. You weren't yourself, you know. You lived through Angus and you lived through Joanna, but you didn't really live as Shelley. This weekend”—my father hugged me as hard as he ever had, so tight I could hardly breathe—“Shelley, my real reunion this weekend is with you.”

  The plane was late, of course.

  Whenever you're eager to move on to the next phase of your life, the plane is always delayed.

  We were waiting in the terminal as if waiting for the dentist. Endless silent staring at the bucket seats opposite, at other people's knees and the backs of their newspapers.

  Angus had left his leg in Aunt Maggie's car.

  “Don't you want your leg?” she said.

  “No, thank you,” said Angus. “I think you can throw it in the trash for me. If you would.”

  All this courtesy made Aunt Maggie suspicious. She thought maybe she should have the security people ru
n the leg through X rays just in case it was something she didn't want around either.

  “No, really,” said Angus. “I've outgrown it. You realize I'm going to be thirteen soon. Thanks for a wonderful visit, Aunt Maggie. You made us all feel so welcome.”

  “It's me,” said Annette. “I've succeeded where thousands failed. I've taught him manners, propriety and common sense.”

  On our way through security, Angus said to Carolyn, “Don't let anybody see you're reading a guidebook to New York.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don't want anybody thinking you don't know your way around. You want to be cool and experienced.”

  “Oh,” said Carolyn. She flattened the book on itself so that the back cover pressed against the front cover and nobody could guess what she was reading. “Other instructions?” she asked Angus.

  “I think we're fine now,” said Angus, surveying us carefully.

  After we got through security, Daddy bought two newspapers and we trudged to our gate to hear the unwelcome news that we were indefinitely postponed. We sat. We stared. Angus was calm and sober.

  Annette began humming softly to herself.

  “Annette!” whispered Angus. “Shh. People can hear you.”

  “Angus, I have quite a nice hum. I'm on pitch and everything.”

  The waiting area was packed. People had filled all the seats and were leaning on walls and sitting on the carpet and on their luggage, looking morose and sullen.

  “People will think you're weird,” he said in a low voice.

  There was a long silence.

  “Angus,” I said, “are you embarrassed in public? Is Annette humiliating you with her behavior?” “

  Yes.”

  “Angus, this is a happy day in the family calendar. Revenge is at hand.”

  Angus looked wary.

  “You've been the weird one for twelve years,” I told him. “It's my turn.” I set my book down. I stood up. I stretched my arms and beat on my chest. “I will start by singing opera. I will stand on my chair and entertain these sorry masses until we board. Some of them will be less grateful than others. I will get autographs from those persons who applaud, however.” I cleared my throat. I hummed a pitch to start my aria on.