The Cousins

by Rona Jaffe

  “But Kenny specifically wanted you to come,” Olivia said, feeling the disappointment rise up because she already knew he would have it his way. “He put your name on the envelope and the RSVP card. He knows you don’t go anywhere—he could have written ‘and guest.’ ”

  “Who would you have as a guest?” he asked, teasing.

  “Wozzle. She’ll go anywhere.”

  “Because she’s got no sense. Besides, someone has to stay here.”

  “We’ll get someone. Other doctors take vacations.”

  “I don’t call that a vacation. You go. You’ll get to catch up with your cousins. I’ll be fine.”

  Of course he would be fine, she thought. If he went with her he’d be tired and grouchy, even though to them he would be as charming as he always was. She could understand how he felt about this particular effort, but it was so obvious that Roger didn’t have sentiment for any of the important rites of passage in family life that by now it embarrassed her. Everyone else’s husband was so good, and her boyfriend—lover? companion?—was so different. Pretty soon the family would stop inviting him to anything.

  She hadn’t seen Jason since he was four years old, when Kenny and Gloria had still been married and they had taken a trip to New York. She doubted if she would even recognize him. But that wasn’t the point. You couldn’t let whole lives go by without even trying to look in on them once in a while. They were her blood. She wanted to be there, no matter how much trouble it was, if only for Kenny, and for curiosity.

  * * *

  Kenny was in his first year of medical school when he brought Gloria Weinstein to Mandelay. Olivia already knew he was having an affair with Gloria because he had told her.

  “How is it?” she had asked, because Kenny was so shy he’d never even had a real girlfriend before, or at least none she knew about.

  “She’s not very good,” Kenny said. “But neither am I.”

  He was a young man with a depth of naiveté that was almost childlike, despite having been brought up with money and privilege. Gloria was a plump Bronx blonde with no money, loud and bossy and full of energy, and of course the family didn’t approve of her, but Olivia did. She was a secretary with no particular career ambitions, which in that family was fine, but what they didn’t like was that she was so open about their sexual relationship, going into Kenny’s room and shutting the door and staying there all night, in case they hadn’t already gotten the picture from their afternoon “naps”; and this made them afraid she was going to control his life. When he married Gloria his parents changed their wills, putting everything in trust, already planning for what they considered the inevitable divorce.

  Actually, Kenny and Gloria seemed to be very happy together. She worked while he went to medical school, and when he decided to move to California and make his practice there she was completely agreeable even though it meant she would have to leave behind all her friends. Kenny had only one close friend, a man he’d known since first grade—Gloria was his best friend, his playmate, his confidante. His parents died quite quickly, one after the other, of heart attacks, and then Gloria became his entire world.

  Despite what had been the family’s distrust, Gloria settled into the life of the wife of a successful heart surgeon, pillar of the community, patron of the arts, with good grace and a dash of wit. They built a beautiful house overlooking the ocean, with a lot of glass. Gloria became active on various benefit committees. She never complained about Kenny’s long hours. She brought the new friends she had made into his life, so that nobody ever noticed anymore how shy he actually was. Twice a year they would take a wonderful vacation; to Europe or South America or Africa or the Middle East; to rain forests or pyramids or historic ruins. They both became good amateur photographers, and the blown-up color photos of what they had seen decorated the walls of their modern house. After a number of years they had a son, Jason, and immediately began taking him along on their trips, even though the family fretted that he was going to catch something. Now big photographs of the three of them began to decorate the modern walls, covering them, until there was nothing left but the bright images of past adventures and the blue limitless ocean beyond.

  Then one year, when Jason was six, the three of them went on a trek up the Himalayas. Kenny was still thin then, in good shape, and he and Gloria enjoyed physical activity on their vacations. But when they were ready to start down Gloria said to Kenny, “You go on home with Jason. I’m going to stay here and visit my guru.” Apparently she was into Eastern religions at the time, and apparently there was a guru somewhere up there, or maybe not. So Kenny went down the Himalayas with Jason, and Gloria ran off with the Sherpa.

  After the “incident” happened no one in the family gossiped about it, as if something like that would go away and be forgotten if it was not mentioned. Gloria and Kenny got divorced, he kept custody of their son, and Gloria married the Sherpa, Tenzing, and moved with him to India, where she embraced his family with much more fervor than she ever had her own. She and Tenzing opened a travel agency and took tourists on treks, where she met several celebrities. On school vacations Jason went to India to stay with her, and since he had been to many exotic places already and was still quite young, he considered this perfectly normal.

  As for Kenny, he took it hard. He devoted himself to raising Jason, and although he was considered a prime catch and dated a variety of women, he did not show the slightest interest in remarrying. He gained weight, even though there was a history of heart disease in his family. He did not know what to do about all those photographs of happier days, and finally just left them where they were—Gloria, after all, was still Jason’s mother.

  When Olivia first heard the story she thought it was bizarre and something only Gloria would do, but then when she thought about it she began to see it more clearly, even though perhaps only Gloria would do it in exactly that way.

  Once she dared to ask Kenny about it. “Why did Gloria run off with Tenzing? What did she want in her life? Was it adventure?”

  “Something like that,” Kenny mumbled, his eyes darting away, and he looked so embarrassed Olivia knew it was true, and that he still took it personally.

  * * *

  It was over an hour to Kennedy Airport, five and a half hours on the plane, and two hours driving to Santa Barbara in a rented car, but by the time Olivia got to the hotel, because of the time difference it was still daytime, the sun shining brightly. The hotel was an old Spanish-style stucco building surrounded by gardens and palm trees, with the beach and ocean across the street. She unpacked her party clothes and started feeling a little better. Her room was pretty: done in French country-style, with pale colors, nice fabrics and a view of the pool. She thought of collapsing on the king-sized bed for a nap, but the activity below distracted her, so she put on her bathing suit and went to find her cousins at the pool.

  Jenny and Melissa waved to her from under an umbrella and she joined them. “Hi, hi, hi,” they all said, and kissed.

  A pool boy gave her a towel and brought her the iced tea she had ordered. In the near distance were the happy screams of children and the sound of splashing. The sky was deep blue, there was a cool breeze, she had a drink and a book and a lounge to lie on; Roger didn’t know what he was missing.

  Max and Sam and Abe and Jake, little boys with the names of old men, were playing water polo, their bodies sleek as seals.

  “Where are the girls?”

  “With their fathers on the beach,” Melissa said. “Did Roger come?”

  “No.” Neither of them seemed surprised or at all condemnatory. Olivia realized it was she they were glad to see, although of course they would have been happy to see Roger, too. She would call him later from the room to say good night before they went out to dinner.

  “Isn’t this great?” Jenny said. Olivia noticed that Jenny and Melissa both looked excellent in their swimsuits, even after having all t
hose children. She hoped she looked as good to them.

  “It’s wonderful.”

  “What we should do,” Jenny said, “is get together like this as a family without having to wait for events like funerals and bar mitzvahs.”

  “Right.”

  “At a place like this,” Melissa said. “Bill and I were saying that we would like to come here for a vacation sometime. We’ve reserved a tennis court for tomorrow afternoon after the service.”

  “We should have a cousins club,” Jenny said. “We could get everybody together here, or a nice resort hotel more conveniently located; say, once or twice a year.”

  “I would do it,” Olivia said.

  “Like Mandelay,” Melissa said. She and Jenny looked at each other and sighed.

  “Don’t you miss Mandelay?” Jenny said to both of them.

  “Yes,” Olivia said, but she was lying. She had never felt the same way about Mandelay as the other cousins did. They had played happily with their invited friends in that country paradise, but her mother had driven away every friend she ever had, wanting to keep Olivia for herself.

  “Nick went to see it this summer,” Melissa said. “He drove right up and told them we used to live there, and asked them if he could look around. They were nice about it.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “The same, except they remodeled the kitchen.”

  “That dark kitchen in the basement,” Jenny said. “I liked it. The food . . . Do you remember the wonderful food?”

  Olivia did, and the almost ritualistic nature of the elaborate meals, but she also remembered spending her summers dreaming about the enticing, forbidden world outside, where she could have the freedom of her own house, her own life. She supposed she had married as soon as she could not only because it was expected but also to have a buffer against her mother’s excessive love and fear.

  “You realize we’ll never be able to afford anything like that again,” Melissa said. “Unless we all get together.”

  What a fantasy, Olivia thought. I wouldn’t do it.

  “They should never have sold it,” Jenny said. “Nobody asked us.”

  “We couldn’t have afforded it then either,” Olivia said reasonably.

  “Why did they sell it?” Jenny asked. It was a rhetorical question by now. They all knew the answer. It was too much trouble. Too expensive. People had died. The kids will never keep it up.

  “They should have asked us.”

  They crunched the last of their ice noisily, the way they had done when they were children, and laughed when they realized they were doing it. “How did you feel being an only child?” Jenny asked Olivia.

  “I didn’t mind,” she said lightly. “I figured there weren’t any more kids for my mother to make neurotic.”

  Neither of them tried to deny this to be nice; they knew how overprotective Lila had been. But Olivia had wondered many times how it would have felt to have a brother or sister, neurotic or not. Somehow she had always fantasized this person as a brother. They would have been the best of friends. Two children, a boy and a girl; a warm and manageable size for a family, in her opinion. Dick and Jane without Spot—oh, well. It had never occurred to her that she might have had a sister.

  “I hated being an only child,” Jenny said. “Do you remember how I used to sit on the back porch swing with my dolls all day and pretend they were my children?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “Having children was the most significant thing that happened in my whole life,” Jenny said. “You go into a hospital alone and you come out with another person.”

  “I know,” Melissa said. “I felt that way, too.”

  “How many more are you going to have?” Olivia asked.

  Jenny looked at her aghast. “No more. I’m not crazy.”

  A picture flashed into Olivia’s mind of Jenny holding one of her children as an infant—was it Sam, the firstborn?—at a family party. Jenny was still overweight from her recent pregnancy, her face round, and the baby was chewing on her cheek. How large her face must have seemed to him, like a planet.

  “I was afraid to have kids,” she said. “I was sure I’d be a bad mother.”

  “At least you knew it,” Jenny said.

  So now I’m everything my mother warned me about, Olivia thought. No parents, no siblings, no children, no husband . . . but I have Roger. He’s my husband, my brother, my family. And it may sound crazy, but we have our dogs, and they’re our children.

  “Where are Grady and Taylor?” she asked, looking around.

  “They’re going to drive up tomorrow,” Jenny said. “There’s no point in their spending money on a hotel.”

  “It’s a long trip,” Olivia said.

  “The way you drive, yes,” Melissa said. “The way Grady drives, forty-five minutes.”

  “Do you think Grady’s gay?” Jenny asked. It was a subject the cousins often discussed. It seemed to Olivia that they spent a lot of their time together gossiping about the family, particularly Grady.

  “I asked him once,” Olivia said. “I told him I wouldn’t care, I just wanted him to be happy, but he said he wasn’t gay; he couldn’t have a relationship or get married because he couldn’t trust anybody.”

  “None of us would care,” Jenny said. “It just seems a shame he has to hide it from the family.”

  “Well,” Melissa said, “he’s thirty-five and doesn’t go out with women, and his male friends are all fifteen years younger than he is—do you remember when he came back from that trip and showed us pictures of that hunk?”

  “Aunt Julia used to say they were friends from school,” Olivia said. “Grady would have been in prep school when they were six.”

  “Does Taylor know?”

  “She’d have to know, wouldn’t she?”

  “But he lives with Miranda, or whatever her name is, that actress.”

  “Used to.”

  “They broke up?”

  “I heard.”

  “Are we sure it was a romance?”

  “Well, they lived together. She was supposed to be his girlfriend.”

  “Maybe it was a phase.”

  “Aunt Julia wouldn’t have cared if he was gay. Why is he so secretive?”

  “Well, stuntmen. That world is so macho. Did you ever hear of a gay stuntman?”

  “I’ve heard rumors.”

  Grady. They shrugged and sighed. They had wrung the subject dry, until the next time.

  “It’s hard to be in this family and not be born a Miller,” Jenny said.

  “It’s hard even if you are one,” Melissa said.

  They all smiled at each other, a little ruefully. “But harder if you’re not,” Melissa said to Olivia. “Your mother didn’t like my mother. She never accepted her.”

  Olivia was surprised that Melissa knew. Nobody had liked Hedy, the sharp-tongued outsider sister-in-law, but she hadn’t thought Hedy noticed. “I guess.”

  “They didn’t like my father either,” Jenny said. “He always felt like an outsider, and I identified with him. I always felt like an outsider, too.”

  “Why?”

  “I had different values.”

  “Well, I’m the one they don’t approve of now,” Olivia said. “I take care of animals instead of people.”

  “They think you’re too independent,” Jenny said. “It scares them. But they don’t approve of me either. They think I’m too stingy.”

  Everyone knew Jenny bought her children’s clothes at Goodwill and cut their hair herself. She also cut her own hair and was pretty good at it, and proud of it. All her children went to public school, and when dividend checks came in from Julia’s they were given to charity or put into the savings account. Unlike the rest of the family, she and Paul lived completely on what they earned.

  “
My mother said if I don’t spend my money she’s not going to leave me any,” Jenny said.

  “She actually said that?”

  “Yes. So don’t feel bad.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “You have to remember one thing,” Jenny said. “No matter what, they will always love you. They will always love you.”

  The little girls came running back from the beach then, all sandy, apparently not jet-lagged, herded by their exhausted fathers. Jenny’s three, Didi, Kara and Belinda, flung their arms around Olivia and nuzzled into her, and then threw their heads back to look at her, grinning with joy. Melissa’s Yael hung back shyly and glanced away; and Nick’s Amber, with an expression of total disinterest, didn’t even know her. Well, three out of five isn’t bad, Olivia thought.

  “Are you sure you really want to go out and get pizza with us?” Jenny asked. “Won’t you be bored?”

  “No, I’ll love it.”

  When she went up to her room to change there was a message from Roger. “Gone for a bite, will be asleep when you get in, have fun, call you tomorrow.” She felt a momentary pang of homesickness for him. She wished he had thought to page her at the pool.

  He called in the morning and woke her up. “I woke you, didn’t I,” he said. “I wanted to be sure to catch you. I’m going out to do some errands.”

  “My alarm is going to go off any minute,” Olivia said. He sounded busy and lively and not very sorry she wasn’t there, but of course it was three hours later in New York and almost time for lunch.

  “What have you got planned for today?” he asked pleasantly.

  “The service and bar mitzvah, then back to the hotel to recover while the kid counts his money, then the big dinner party in the hotel ballroom. The family won’t speak to the friends, the kids won’t speak to the grown-ups and everybody will have a wonderful time. What are you going to do?”

  “Saturday stuff. Work out. Maybe buy some shirts. Watch the game.”