We found a good spot for launching: a place where the water was choppy enough to make for an exciting course, but not so rough as to capsize our craft altogether. There were enough broad flat rocks that we could step across to dislodge a vessel if one got stuck on a twig or hung up on some leaves. And because the brook flowed reasonably straight there, we could follow our boats downstream a little way, instead of losing track of them in a moment when they rounded the first bend.
I want to describe these boats because each one told something about the child who made it. Charlie’s, unnamed, had a single mast, a red and black flag, the silver cap from an old shampoo bottle stuck on right in the middle. He worked very hard making this boat, and put a lot of thought into the placement of each feature. When he was all done, he announced he didn’t want to sail it. He’d rather just hold on to his boat and keep it in his room.
Aaron had chosen a more elaborate boat design, with cardboard tubes from used-up toilet-paper rolls and bits of foil and a balloon and bottle caps all over the place, attached with liberal amounts of glue. Ben, his big brother, had actually gone so far as to consider flotation factors in his design. Willy cared only that he have some Styrofoam object, with a balloon attached, to fling into the water (and I was concerned chiefly with insuring that only the boat, and not Willy, got dunked). Audrey had made a kind of yacht, named Amelia, with a lifeboat, a captain and crew member made out of clothespins with glued-on yarn hair, a cabin, a couple of sails, silver streamers, a purple feather sticking up from the mast, and a few forsythia blossoms at the prow. She was willing to launch her masterpiece, but attached a long string so she’d be able to retrieve it.
I’m not sure I myself understand the source of the excitement produced by seeing a boat you’ve constructed actually making it from one point on a stream to another point a little farther down that stream. We all know water flows. We all know Styrofoam floats. But launching a boat, seeing it bob along, racing along the banks to meet it, and reeling it in again farther down—well, all that is not a whole lot less thrilling to me now, at age thirty-two, than it was at age eight.
For over an hour we launched these boats and watched them go, and dislodged them from the rocks, ran ahead, met them as they came by, reeled them in, then launched them all over again. And of course Willy did get soaked. And of course the toilet-paper rolls on Aaron’s boat did get waterlogged. And the sails fell off, and the balloons came undone. None of the boats looked much like boats after a while (and in truth, we didn’t look much like sailors, either).
It was getting late. Willy’s pants were so wet that I was wringing them out like a dishtowel. I told Audrey we’d take one more run, and then we’d better head for home.
But the Amelia hit a trouble spot: a little eddy of swirling water that sucked her pink balloon ballast over a rocky dropoff, causing her to capsize. Audrey managed to rescue the boat, but when she did, I heard her let out a wail. The captain and crewperson were missing, lost in the muddy depths of Beard Brook, along with the purple feather. Losing the feather Audrey could bear. It was losing those two little wooden people that made her weep.
So I put my arms around her and we talked about bodies of water and boats. How our small brook flows into a river, and how that river flows into an even larger river, and that large river flows into the sea, which stretches all the way to England. I suppose some people might think those two clothespin people will simply end up buried in the muddy brook bed or snagged on a stick a little way downstream. As for me, I picture them washing ashore on some African beach or bobbing across the English Channel some day, round about next August, where surely there will be someone waiting to receive them, with joy and wonder.
And that, it occurs to me, is pretty much how I feel about launching children into the turbulent waters it will be up to them to navigate. Their father and I will put our mark on them, for sure: we’ll lower them gently, run along the banks a ways, step out on the rocks to get them unstuck when necessary, reel them in, even, a time or two. And then they’ll be off, toward some distant and unknown destination, while we stand on the shore, waving and cheering, watching them go.
GROWING OLDER
Sixteen
Joan Baez Concert
The Baby Stroller
Selling Our Land
Greg and Kate Have a Baby
STEVE AND I HAD just come home from the movies. I was paying Jennifer, our babysitter; Steve was outside in the car, waiting to take her home. She mentioned that she had celebrated her sixteenth birthday the other day. She’s taking driver’s education now, of course. She’ll have her license by summer.
Well, it’s sixteen years since I was sixteen years old. Hard to believe: I don’t feel that different. I can still remember so clearly the day I got my driver’s license. The freedom I felt, getting into my parents’ hulking Oldsmobile for the first time and pulling out of the driveway alone, with a thousand miles of highways stretching before me.
When I was sixteen I got my first real boyfriend. Bud was his name: a big, curly-haired boy, a year older than I—admired and even loved by nearly everybody in our school. He liked to fish and he had a passion for soccer. He drove a Model A Ford with a window shade in the back. He kept a plaid blanket in the trunk, and a flask of rum. He had a hearty laugh and a marvelous wit, but also, more than once, I saw him cry. I love my husband, but I would probably still melt if I ran into Bud tomorrow.
I had always been the kind of girl parents call reliable. A daughter my parents could feel easy about leaving in a house with a full liquor cabinet. A much-sought-after babysitter. An A student, headed for the college of my choice. Probably the worst thing I’d ever done, my first fifteen years, was show up at school tardy once or twice.
Bud got me onto a six-person toboggan, on an icy hill. He got me to jump off a rope swing into the river. I cut classes with him: He taught me it was a crime to study Latin on the first warm day of spring. In his basement rec room, late at night, he played Jimi Hendrix records and fingered an imaginary guitar. I bet we put a thousand miles on his Model A, after school and weekends, just driving around. Every time I drink rum, I think of him.
He wasn’t what you would call a bad boy. Didn’t drive drunk. Would never have destroyed property, or hurt a soul. What he did was simply give me a chance to leave the comfortable, safe life I had been living under my parents’ roof and venture forth for a few hours every Saturday night. And he made possible some leaps I might never have taken if I hadn’t met him. He threw open a way of living that was a little riskier, a little less comfortable, more filled with possibilities. There are some things mothers and fathers just can’t teach their teenagers about, though if they’re smart they’ll recognize it’s not necessarily a bad idea if someone else does. Many of those lessons I got from Bud.
Our school soccer team won the state championship that year, with Bud as goalie. The team retired well before the first snowfall, but spent all the rest of that year celebrating. I have watched a lot of ball games since then, but I have never seen a group of players so tightly linked, so much a team. Skinny Joe, the left wing. Heartbreakingly handsome Nick, the forward. Gangly Kevin, a guard. Broad, laughing Bud, seeming almost to fill the space between the goalposts. They looked nothing alike, but went through life like brothers. Every time I saw them, it seemed someone had a soccer ball, and it was always in midair.
They were all graduating that June, going to the state university in our town or to jobs. I was a year younger, but I was leaving too: heading to a private prep school where, I’d been told, I would meet up with the best, brightest young minds in the country. It was understood, between Bud and me, that we would most likely go our separate ways come fall. Certainly I was way too young to make a commitment to anyone, even if I loved him. I wanted to begin my new Ivy League life with my heart unspoken for. I even thought that when I got to my new school I’d go by my middle name (Daphne). I was going to be a whole new person. Arty, sophisticated. Intellectual. How could I be t
hose things, as long as I was spending my weekends driving around, listening to the radio and hanging out at Packer’s Falls? But meanwhile, that summer, I kept looking forward to Saturday nights with Bud.
Late that June—a night I had stayed home—there was a car accident. Two carloads of kids smashed into each other when one of the drivers failed to negotiate a turn, and all seven were killed instantly. Bud was not in either of the cars, but three of his teammates (Joe and Nick and Kevin) were.
The next night, a Saturday, he picked me up as usual, and we just drove around for hours. Sometime around midnight we ended up in a field outside town, where we spread out his old blanket, as usual, leaned against each other, and wept. All the rest of that summer, I remember wondering if I would ever, in my whole life, feel right again.
We went out together a few more times after that. It’s strange I can’t even remember the last time clearly, and I guess that’s because after the accident Bud and I drifted apart. He did go on to the state university that fall. I did go to prep school. (Where I kept forgetting to answer to the name Daphne, and eventually went back to Joyce.)
There was a soccer team at my new school. There were boys with whom I discussed record albums and SAT scores. And there were several I knew who talked a lot, that year, about the importance of what they called “the real world,” which was why they were applying to an alternative school that gave college credit for farming. But it was years before I met anyone else who made me laugh the way Bud did, or just asked me if I’d like to jump in the brook. (When someone did, I married him.)
It’s hard for me to comprehend that I am not much closer to sixteen now than I am to fifty; that if I could somehow meet up with one of those dead boys from the old soccer team (all of whom are forever seventeen), they would probably call me “ma’am.” I drive cautiously now, with my littlest son in the car seat and my two other children buckled in among the groceries. The sixteen-year-olds honk at me as they whizz by me in the passing lane.
“I hope you drive safely,” I tell our babysitter, Jennifer, as she gathers up her books to go. But my advice seems insufficient and insubstantial. I could tell her all sorts of other things, about falling in love, growing up, taking some risks, resisting others. But of course I know better. All I do is ask her if she’s busy next Saturday night.
I think I was ten years old the first time I went to hear a live concert. The performer was Joan Baez; I doubt if she was even twenty then. My sister and I had ridden a bus from New Hampshire to Boston just to see her, after playing her records so many times we knew every ballad by heart: “Silver Dagger,” “All My Trials,” “Barbara Allen”—stories about love and loss, passion, heartbreak. I guess I was in the fifth grade then, but listening to Joan Baez sing about those things, I felt I understood all there was to know about life. Her voice was so clear and pure: I remember sitting in the auditorium that summer and shivering. When the concert was over, my sister and I gathered up our Greek shoulderbags and our ticket stubs (we would keep them forever) and headed for the Greyhound station. First thing the next morning, we were practicing the guitar.
I played folk songs for a few years—wore my hair long, bought every record Joan Baez and Judy Collins made. But there were other kinds of music developing in those years, and I branched out. The Beatles (hard to understand, looking at photographs of them, why their hair seemed so shocking back in 1964; now they look clean cut). The Rolling Stones, of course. Bob Dylan. With his scruffy clothes and his raspy voice, and his wailing harmonica, he was everything Joan Baez wasn’t, but we loved him too, my sister and I—and, we read, so did Joan.
It was a time when performers—those performers, anyway—stood for something besides the music. Every folk concert came with a message, and usually several. (About the war in Vietnam. Poverty. Nonviolence. Peace.) Even the rock musicians, who seldom lectured on those things, conveyed a kind of stand. There was a world out there, of parents and business people and government, called the Establishment. And though few people in our country were doing bigger business or becoming more successfully established than rock performers, they were on the other side. They would never be conventional. Never be old.
When I was sixteen I sat in the front row at a Janis Joplin concert. I saw the Rolling Stones on tour, and a lot of bands I can’t even remember anymore. I lit a match—along with several thousand others—in a pitch-black, packed arena— while Dylan played an electrified version of “Blowing in the Wind.” I didn’t go to Woodstock, but of course I saw the movie—more than once. And there was Joan Baez again. By this time she was married to man named David Harris (I still followed the mythology), who was going to prison for refusing the draft. She was pregnant, and beautiful as ever.
I went to college. Folk music wasn’t so popular there as rock, but I listened to both. Baez recorded an album, while her husband remained in prison, full of songs about how she awaited his return. The same moon shone on both of them, she sang: he in his prison cell, she, with their baby son, on her California mountaintop. “I live one day at a time,” she sang, her voice as clear and pure as ever.
I left college after one year. I went through a period of listening mostly to classical music, and old tunes from other eras. Forties jazz. French torch songs.
Then, around age twenty, I thought my heart was broken, and the only kind of music that seemed to apply was country, hard-core country. George Jones singing “Stand on My Own Two Knees.” Dolly Parton singing “I Will Always Love You.” I read that Joan Baez’s husband had got out of prison, but things didn’t work out between them and they got a divorce.
I moved to New York City. I had a boyfriend who was very up on rock music, and I went to lots of concerts and clubs with him. He taught me the trick of stuffing wadded-up paper napkins in my ears to protect my hearing. He took me to a real hole-in-the-wall called CBGB’s—thick with smoke, standing room only—to hear a much praised new group called Talking Heads. No possibility of sing-alongs there.
I met Steve, and we moved back to my home state of New Hampshire. Audrey was born, and when she cried, I put on records—sometimes Dolly Parton, sometimes Bob Dylan, sometimes Benny Goodman, sometimes the Beatles—and danced her around our kitchen. That almost always worked. We had a few Sesame Street records, and, for Christmastime, Alvin and the Chipmunks singing “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.” But mostly what I played for Audrey was the music I myself loved best. She knew the words to “Yellow Submarine” and “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road.” She liked Stevie Wonder singing “Isn’t She Lovely,” and she loved the Solid Gold Dancers. Just because Steve and I were parents now didn’t mean we were old. When babysitters came to our house, I always made a point of showing them how to work the stereo.
We went to Disney World on Ice in Boston, and to the circus, but we didn’t go to concerts much. We did, once, drive to the city to hear one rock performer we liked, when I was eight months pregnant with Charlie. Steve and I were the oldest ones in sight, and certainly I was the only mother in evidence. The music was amplified very loud, and I had no paper napkin with me. I can still remember the extraordinary feeling of Charlie, in my belly, motionless through every number but kicking wildly every time there was applause. Around the third song, the audience got up on its feet, and stayed there the rest of the evening. My ankles hurt, so I stayed seated—fuming at the thoughtless behavior of the younger generation, that made it impossible for me to see.
Two years later, when I was pregnant again (with Willy), I got a magazine assignment to fly to England and interview the rock singer Elvis Costello. I spent a week listening to Costello tapes, bought myself the most new-wave maternity outfit I could find, and hopped on the plane. I was staying at a hotel frequented by a lot of rock singers: in the dining room, the next morning, my coffee was served by a waitress with a purple streak in her hair. Two tables away, a man in a black leather jacket and mohawk was eating French toast.
It had been a long time since I’d been out on an assignment
like this—not since before I was married—and I worried that I wouldn’t seem sophisticated enough. As it turned out, Elvis Costello (wearing a jacket and tie) behaved pretty much like any businessman. After the interview was done, I walked back to his house with him, to meet his wife and son. Their kitchen looked a lot like mine. Their son was getting ready to go camping.
That fall Charlie started going to a babysitter who got MTV, and he developed a passion for Michael Jackson. Every night after his bath, he and Audrey listened to the Thriller album—Audrey doing a graceful, restrained version of breakdancing, Charlie (still naked) going wild. It got so he could render a pretty convincing imitation of Michael, with a simulated moonwalk. He talked about Jackson all the time. (Charlie could spot his picture on the cover of a magazine in the supermarket from way over in the cereal aisle.) So when I heard the Jackson Five were going on tour, remembering what it had meant to me to see Joan Baez all those years back, I got myself an assignment to write about them so that I could bring Charlie and Audrey to the concert.
I thought we’d be among the oldest people in the hall that night, but it turned out there were many parents like us, bringing children. The crowd was orderly and there was no smell of marijuana wafting over the crowd the way there used to be in the concerts of my teens. This performance resembled a sporting event more than a concert. We all had a good time, but it also seemed to me that the best concerts of our youth were more powerful, more stirring.
Domestic Affairs Page 25
