by Lily King
After the cake is served I stand and tap my glass.
“As many of you know, my father is a man of surprises. All my life he has surprised me with gifts, live animals, lectures, highly inappropriate jokes—” People laugh. “But nothing has surprised me more than his strength and determination these last two months. I couldn’t be more proud of him. Or more thankful. I love you, Dad.”
There is applause as I kiss his cheek and he hugs me and says something I can’t hear.
People start chanting “Speech, speech,” and my father who, despite his desire for attention, dreads all forms of public speaking, stands up.
“Well, you all outsmarted me, that’s for sure. Ben telling me he was going fishing with his son this weekend, and then Neal there pretending that he hadn’t seen Billy Hatcher steal home when he was actually at the game, the lucky bastard. So thank you all for showing up here tonight. I need to raise a glass to my daughter now because she did all this for me. She has given up so much for me—” The next word comes out as a squeak and he shakes his head and their are tears in the cracks of his skin around his eyes. He raises his cranberry soda and then sits down quickly and his napkin shakes in his fingers as he lifts it to wipe his face.
I pat his leg. He takes my hand and holds it tight. If Jonathan hadn’t thrown that party for me in June, I wouldn’t have given this night to my father. I wish he knew how grateful I am.
After dinner I change the music in the poolhouse to Glenn Miller, and when I come out people are already dancing in the grass and along the edge of the pool. Eventually nearly everyone gets up and bounces around. Only a couple of my father’s old friends, men who need a few drinks in order to dance, sit on lawn chairs and watch. My father, who has never needed even music to dance, spins me around. I see Neal dancing with Patricia, Mike dancing with Mrs. Keck, William with Philomena. Every time I look I see a different combination of people. When I’m dancing with Mr. Utley, Dad cuts in on Mr. Keck for Patricia. He spins her. Then he runs into the poolhouse and comes out with a lifesaver ring around his waist. The music turns slow and my father takes her hand in one of his and puts his other in the hollow of her back. Mr. Utley does the same with me. He is so tall my arms are reaching straight up, as if I’m climbing a ladder.
“I’ve never seen your father quite like this, Daley. You’re a good influence on him.”
Particia looks uncomfortable now. She is leaning away from him, and when the song ends she leaves the dancing area. She goes directly to her purse, shoulders it, and heads for her car.
I catch up with her before she reaches the driveway. “I’m sorry, Patricia. Did my father say something that offended you?”
“No, no. That’s not it. I’m just not feeling very well.”
“Please tell me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Please. I need to know what he said to you.”
She looks down at the keys in her hand. She just wants to leave. “He’s drinking, Daley.”
“No, he’s not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know my father when he’s been drinking. I know exactly what that’s like.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I let her disappear into the darkness beyond the torches. I walk slowly back to the party. My father is dancing with Philomena, perhaps even more ridiculously than he danced with Patricia, still in the white ring, strutting like a chicken, a snorkel in his mouth like a rose. I see how she could have thought he was drunk. So much of him is still a child. But he isn’t drunk. He’s just himself, and he’s happy.
“Now that was a party,” my father says as we sit on the porch steps afterward while the dogs take their last pees before bed.
“What did you think when you pulled in?”
“Fire. I thought there was a fire.”
“The torches.”
“And all the people. I swear I saw some of them carrying buckets.”
I laugh.
“You probably don’t remember, but your mother used to have these kinds of parties, just like this: round tables, white tablecloths, waitresses. But they were never for me. It was always for some Democrat. She never even wanted me there. I hope she’s watching right now. I hope she saw what you did for me tonight.”
“How did you hear that she died, Dad?”
“We were playing paddle at the Chapmans’. Herbie Parker told me just as we were walking onto the court.”
I see the Chapmans’ paddle tennis court in the woods behind their house, the heavy stumpy paddle racquets, my father’s head bent to listen. I need my father to talk about her death. The party has brought her back for me too, all night long.
“And what did you feel?”
“Oh, God, I think I probably felt everything in the book. I didn’t play very well that day. I remember that.”
“And then what’d you do?”
“Went home. Catherine already knew. It was a shock. She was the first one of us to go.”
“Did you ever think about how I was feeling? Or Garvey?” This is hard. Everything in me starts quivering. “Because you never called or came by.”
“I guess I just couldn’t acknowledge it.”
“What? Her death?”
“No.” He looks down at his hands on his knees. “Your attachment to her.”
“Because it felt like a betrayal?”
“Something like that.”
“I wish it didn’t always have to be a competition.”
“Me too. “He puts his arm around me and kisses my forehead. It reminds me of Grindy. “I’m sorry, Daley.”
He’s never said that, not once, ever, for anything.
The dogs rustle around in the woods. It’s close to two in the morning. I feel heavy and tired.
My father stands up and the dogs come racing up the steps. “Well, I’ve had a lot of surprises in my life,” he says. “Most of them bad. But this was a good one.” He puts out his hand and pulls me up. “You’s a real keeper, you know that?”
He is steady on his feet. He smells like prime rib. Patricia was wrong. He is perfectly sober.
19
I can’t help calling Garvey the next day.
“Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’ve met a venture capitalist from Marblehead and the wedding’s next Saturday at the Episcopal Church.”
“He’s doing well, Garve. Day sixty-one.”
“It’s creepy the way you count the days like that.”
“It works.”
“It’s all going to end in tears. Remember how Mom used to say that whenever we were having fun? It’s all going to end in tears.”
I ask him how plans for the new branch in Hartford are going and he says he’s been interviewing “cuties” for the office manager position.
“You’ve heard of sexual harassment laws, right?”
“I’m not going to harass them. I’ll leave them alone afterward. Seriously, I did meet someone. This doctor who was moving out of her place, getting a divorce. We have a little sizzle going on. She’s having a party Saturday night.”
“You going?”
“I might, if I’m not too tired.”
He had a bad breakup a few years ago and now claims love is not worth the ugly ending.
“Come visit us.”
He laughs. “Not a chance.”
“What’d he say to you that morning, Garvey?”
“Nothing new.”
“He was in a lot of pain then.”
“And now with your magical anthropology PhD wand, you’ve erased it all.”
“What if he’s still not drinking at Thanksgiving. Will you come for that?”
“No.”
And then, that same morning, I get a phone call. My father hands me the phone and my heart is racing but the voice is female. It’s Mallory.
“I hear you’re throwing big parties,” she says.
“Only for people sixty and over,” I say. “Where are you?”
“Here, but we’re leaving this af
ternoon. Can you meet me at Baker’s Cove in an hour?”
I hitch up the dogs and grab the little bag with my notebook in it. It’s where I keep notes for a letter to Jonathan. I have fifteen pages of them already, fragments with no structure, like a bad freshman essay. I don’t know where to send it, if I ever manage to write it. I don’t know where he is. He terminated the lease on the cottage. The landlord sent me back the first and last months’ rent but not the security deposit. And when I called the philosophy department at SFSU, the receptionist had never heard of him. She was new, she said, but there was no one on the faculty with the last name Fleury.
It’s high tide so the cove isn’t too smelly. I climb out over the rocks to a little pool of water with its own tiny beach. The dogs find shade behind me and I sit for a long time with the notebook open, writing nothing.
I hear a thud, and a child’s pail with a white braided handle appears on the top of one of the rocks. And then a little girl, not more than six, crawls up, sees me, and sits down abruptly. She has inch-long pigtails just behind each ear. She scoots down the rock, her bucket bumping behind her. When she reaches sand, she drops the bucket and goes right to the water. The pool is no deeper than her knees. She wades in then stands still, bent over, hands on chubby thighs. She is wearing only the bottom of a red bikini with white bows on either side. She remains completely still until her hand shoots into the water and stirs up a cloud on the bottom and then quickly carries something with thrashing claws to the bucket.
“Gracie! My God. I asked you to wait on the rocks until I caught up.”
I only need to see the long O’s of her knees above me on the rocks to recognize Mallory. She climbs down carefully, a baby in a plaid pouch on her chest, beach bags in both arms.
“Which ones you got,” I say, “your mom’s Larks or your dad’s Winstons?”
She lets out one of her big laughs, deeper now. “Can you believe what delinquents we were? That one is starting to read now so I’m thinking I have to throw out all my old diaries so she doesn’t get any ideas. I was just telling her this morning about how we used to argue about whose dog was better.”
I hug her sideways, not wanting to squish the baby, who is so small and sound asleep. In grade school Mallory towered over me and was the kind of girl people called “big-boned.” But now she feels small in my arms, with bones no bigger than mine. Her hair is shorter, but her face is just the same.
“Mine was,” I call to Gracie. “Hers was boring.”
“That’s exactly what you said! I was so mad I didn’t speak to you for days. Her white dog was always filthy, Gracie.”
“Gray. The dog was a gray dog.”
“He needed a bath.”
“You’ve reproduced.”
She laughs again. She has a great laugh, like it comes all the way up from her feet. “I’m a factory. I’ve got a two-year-old boy back with my mother.” She scrunches up her face. “The challenging middle child.”
We laugh because that’s what Mallory is.
“I cannot believe it.” I’m about to add that I didn’t know she’d gotten married but then I have a flash of a memory of an invitation that most likely arrived after being forwarded a few times and right in the middle of some crisis: an overdue paper, 200 exams to be graded. Had I even responded? I can’t remember. Is it possible that I didn’t even RSVP to Mallory’s wedding? A small parade of wedding invitations flashes by: Ginny, Stacy, Pauline. I’m not sure I responded to any of them, certainly never sent a gift. It made no sense to me, why people wanted to get married.
She glances over at where I’ve been sitting in the sand with the notebook. “Can we join you?” she asks, and then she sees the dogs panting in the shade behind us. “What’s this? More dirty dogs?”
“You be nice. You’re a role model now.”
“God help us.” She spreads out two enormous beach towels and erects a little tent for the baby when it wakes up. She attaches a toy to its ceiling. “He blisses out on this hanging chicken thing.” From her cooler, she offers me a selection of juices in small bright boxes and a box of animal crackers.
“Those are mine!” Gracie calls as she drops what looks like a small lobster in the pail. “But you can have them.”
“She’s pretty fearless, isn’t she?”
“She’s obsessed with crustaceans. Whenever we come to Ashing we spend all our time at the water’s edge.”
“How far away are you?” On the phone she said she lives in New Hampshire now.
“About an hour and a quarter. We’re near Nashua.”
Nashua. It was the kind of name we would have made fun of when we were kids, the kind of place whose racetrack was advertised on channel 56. Nashua, we would have said in our pretend Boston nasal accents. Naaashua, New Hampsha. I expected Mallory to be living somewhere glamorous.
“The rumors are flying around town about you.” She laughs hard. “I even heard you were dating Neal Caffrey.”
“No dates, but he is my only friend here.”
“So you really are living in Ashing?”
“My father had a bit of a breakdown when Catherine left.”
“I heard she left. In June, right? Just like your mom.”
“Spring with him must be hell, I guess.”
Gracie howls and Mallory leaps up. Something pinched her finger. Mallory holds the baby’s head as she bends over Gracie in the water, but the baby wakes up anyway. By the time she returns to the towel he’s red and bleating and kicking. She unfastens a series of snaps and pulls out from the cup of her bathing suit an enormous veined udder with a wide brown center and an inch-long nipple which the child seizes in his mouth, sucking the skin up into pleats around his pumping lips. Jesus.
“I was always a little scared of your dad,” she says, then asks if I remember the time we missed the train and he and Catherine came to get us in Allencaster. I didn’t. She says she has a long diary entry about it, how I calmly told them there was a mistake in the schedule but they didn’t believe us. “I cried when they kept yelling at us, but you were so cool and controlled and never cracked.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“Really? I swear, once you have kids—Gracie!” She jumps up again, baby still attached and sucking, and sprints to the water. She splashes in and plunges her left arm to the bottom while the right keeps the baby in position, and hauls up Gracie, whose face has momentarily lost its confidence.
“Breathe,” Mallory shouts, and whacks her on the back. And I watch as the color comes back into the child’s face. Then she looks down at the sandy bottom and up at her mother and bursts into tears. “It’s all right. You’re fine.” Mallory tries to wipe her wet hair out of her eyes but Gracie swats her away.
“I almost had an eel and you scared it away!”
Mallory smiles. “There are no eels here, honey. There’s never been an eel.” Which makes Gracie even more furious.
When Mallory comes back I want to compliment her on her patience but I feel like that might be insulting Gracie. The baby’s meal has gone on uninterrupted. His legs and most of the blue pouch are soaking wet but his eyes press tighter shut each time he sucks.
“You’re thinking, and that’s not even the complicated child.”
I laugh.
“She has no interest in learning how to swim. And she wants to be in the water all day long.”
I’m curious to know what she’d been about to say about having kids. “So, you’ve been reading your old diaries recently?”
“Yeah, I have. It’s funny—” she winces, then yanks her nipple out of the baby’s mouth. It doesn’t look easy. The skin stretches an inch before he releases it. He wails as she lifts him up and out of the wet pouch, and he keeps wailing until she slides him in the tent with the hanging chicken and he stops short. “He starts to bite when he’s done. Drives me crazy.” She pushes her boob back in her suit. I see the long nipple fold in half to fit. Mallory got breasts before me, like everyone else, but they had
been normal, not these pale raw tubers. She doesn’t seem to remember, again, what she was about to say.
We watch Gracie dredge the bottom of the pool with both hands, occasionally taking in water and croaking it out. She has elements of Mallory at that age, the straight dark-blonde hair, the strong thighs, but her square slightly squished face is someone else’s. Her focus, her fixation on a thing, is from her mother, too. And yet that seems to be gone from Mallory now. She can’t follow through on a thought. Her snacks are neatly packed, though. She brings out thinly sliced apples laid carefully in a plastic container with a lime green top. Gracie grabs a few and then hurries back to the water.
“Plumber’s butt,” Mallory says, and Gracie pulls up the droopy back of her suit. “Remember the hours we spent in your mother’s closet? All her fancy clothes. And that wall of shoes! Oh, she was like a real live princess to me.”
The words are familiar. She was at the funeral, I’m remembering now. I sobbed in her arms. And she sobbed too. And then I didn’t see her again until this moment.
Gracie totters slowly toward us with her bucket. Water sloshes at the sides. “I’m thirsty and hungry and thirsty,” she says. She puts the bucket down and takes a little box of juice from her mother. She puts the straw in her mouth and it turns purple. She sucks it all down without stopping, her breathing growing louder and her belly pushing out, then hands the shrunken box back to her mother. “More,” she gasps. But the baby has started fussing in the tent and Mallory is on her knees changing his diaper.
I reach in the bag for another juice box.
“Say thank you, Gracie,” Mallory says without looking. She’s lifting the baby up by his feet with one hand like a plucked chicken.
“Thanks,” Gracie says and hands me back the box half full.
I offer her some crackers but she shakes her head.
“Wanna see my collection?”
I get up and peer into her bucket. Snails, crayfish, starfish, and crabs are piled on top of each other. The crabs are fighting, two against one. I ask her what she’ll do with them, and she says she’ll put them all back. She asks if I’ll help her.
“I’ll carry the bucket,” she says, and lugs it back to the edge of the water. The little white bows on her red bikini have come untied. “Don’t drop them all out together. You need to find the right spot for each one.” She wades in. “Here. Here’s a good spot for a crab.”
