Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Oh crap.”

  “It’s not that far in,” he said, and teed his ball high.

  He hadn’t played in two years, and then just the one time with the two of them, his father’s last round with him, though none of them suspected at the time. While both of his parents were ardent golfers, and encouraging, his swing was the product of thirty years of softball, his short game strictly from the Putt-Putt. Sometime today he would let loose a long sky-climbing bomb of a drive or sink a thirty-footer, and his mother would say, “Imagine how good you’d be if you played regularly,” but he knew he possessed no hidden skills, that the few moments he rose above his own mediocrity were flukes, gifts to be appreciated, not relied on.

  He skulled his tee shot—thinking too much—and it bounded over the cart path, a weak grounder just clearing the light rough and stopping on the nap of the fairway.

  “You’ll have a nice lie,” his mother said.

  She took the passenger seat while he stabbed the shaft of his wood into his father’s bag. He drove the cart no matter where their shots were, just as his father had, the scorecard clipped to the middle of the steering wheel, the Holga stuck in a cup holder. They were playing the fifth, a small par-four, 360 yards with a dogleg left, and so far she hadn’t gotten into his job. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe she’d let an opportunity like this slide. His strategy was to answer her questions head-on and then turn the conversation to her plans, hoping she’d respond to his honesty with her own. The only hard part, he thought, would be defending Meg, stating her case with both tact (a strength) and force (his great weakness). He was prepared to lose any argument they might have, bow out, satisfied that he’d done his best, introduced the issue, leaving the real work to Meg, whose idea it was in the first place. They’d played the same game when they were kids, nothing had changed. He was still trying to make peace between them, and he wondered how much of his personality—how much of his life—had been decided by his position in the family and the role he chose, however unwillingly. He thought it was unfair, being the youngest, but here he was doing it again, the faithful messenger risking his head.

  “There’s you,” his mother pointed, and he swung the cart alongside his ball. The lie was slightly uphill. He took a three-wood, one of the few clubs he could hit with any consistency.

  He paused before he addressed the ball and gazed down the fairway, gauging the trees for a sense of the wind. His father had taught him to concentrate on every shot, not let emotion control him. “They’re all worth the same,” he loved to say, and “You need to think before you hit.” As a child, Ken had felt helpless before his advice, certain it didn’t apply to his loopy, inside-out swing. He could think all he wanted and the ball would still rocket out of bounds or duck-hook into the scrub. He would chase after it with his bag, angry, slashing the underbrush, then dumping his clubs with a clank when he found it, gritting his teeth to slow himself so he could think again, inevitably developing a headache he would blame on the sun. His father was infuriatingly calm and self-deprecating of his own play, wry and lighthearted, as if they were having a good time. “I liked your decision to lay up there,” he’d say, or “That was the smart shot.”

  The smart shot here wasn’t a three-wood. It was too much club. If he hit it thin, he’d overshoot the dogleg and end up in the woods, the rough if he fluffed it. He’d wanted to use some muscle to make up for his drive, a tactic his father would shake his head at—teenage caveman stuff. The smart thing to do was to take maybe a five-iron and leave the ball right so he’d have an approach shot, except he was shaky with his five-iron, horrible with his four.

  He walked back to the cart and pulled out a five-iron, scratching at the ridged club face with a thumbnail, as if for luck.

  “I see,” his mother said theatrically.

  “Well,” he said, “we shall see.”

  His precise but unconscious imitation of his father shocked him, made him suspect his spirit was near. It made sense, here where they’d been together. His father’s money club was his five, the one in his hand. If he was channeling him, Ken thought, now was a good time.

  He took a practice swing, scuffing the grass, then settled his feet a half-step closer, checked the fairway where he wanted it to go, getting his shoulders in line (front shoulder closed, head down, follow through—all the moves his father taught him in the backyard, posing him in slow motion, one hand on the club), then lifted into his backswing and let it fly.

  He barely felt the ball at all, and—a small triumph—he’d kept his head down, didn’t jerk up to watch the shot.

  He heard a familiar click from the cart. His mother had the Holga pointed toward him but had turned to see where he’d gone.

  “Looks good,” she said.

  Now he could pick it out, still rising, a black dot in a white sky, dead right but clear of the trees, one of those shots that could fool him into thinking he might be able to play this game. The ball touched down, got a true hop and a long roll, stopping well past the turn, in the middle of the fairway.

  “Very nice,” his mother said.

  “Hey,” he shrugged, “it’s Dad’s five.”

  “It’s your father’s driver too, and I haven’t seen you hit that all day.”

  On the way to her tee shot, she apologized for taking a picture of him. “I couldn’t resist.”

  He said he knew the feeling. “Probably be the best shot on the roll.”

  “No,” she said coyly, pleased they were teasing each other.

  He had no problem getting along with her. It was when Lise or Meg entered the picture that they ran into trouble. It wasn’t just jealousy but a female love of control, at once social and familial, the complicated opposite of the macho dream of independence, dominance through intimacy. It was politics on a dangerously heartfelt level, where the smallest disagreement could be taken as a betrayal, and out of sheer self-interest he’d developed the slippery skills of a pawn. Even alone with her, joking, he was aware of a subtle positioning, as if he were attending a queen.

  “How’s your work going, by the way?”

  “Good,” he said, a reflex, and slowed the cart. “I think it’s somewhere in here.”

  “I thought it was a little farther.”

  “I’m sure you did. It’s definitely in bounds though.”

  Passing into the shadows beneath the trees was like entering a dark house. The ground was bare back to the white stakes except for the trees’ tortuous roots and some swaths of moss, a few skunk cabbage and sunstruck ferns. This reprieve was only temporary, he knew. After she hit, they’d get in the cart and she’d circle back to the topic, her criticism taking the form of puzzlement, his job incomprehensible—what it was and why he would choose to do it—as if paying the bills and saving money on supplies wasn’t justification enough. Building his skills, as Morgan would say. He wasn’t being realistic, she’d imply, painting him as naive, a dreamer. He had nothing tangible he could point to, not even the promise of success. His friends from high school were doctors and lawyers—an alarming number of them, as if the country were locked in the grip of illness and litigation—and their neighbors’ oldest daughter, whom he remembered as a shrieking baby, was a full-fledged editor in New York.

  A ball was hiding under the skunk cabbage like an Easter egg, right about where he’d figured. The simple juxtaposition was a surprise, elemental (for an instant he envisoned Tracy Ann Caler’s naked foot, the trees strung with crime-scene tape). He wished there was enough light for the Holga, but there wasn’t.

  “Titleist 2?”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He stood back, watching all the time, afraid of a ricochet off a tree. She’d brought a seven-iron with her, and without hesitation she choked down on the grip and punched it under the branches and out into the fairway, nearly even with him.

  “Nicely done.”

  “I got lucky with my lie. If it gets in those roots I have to take a drop. So tell me about this job, it’s at a
photo lab?”

  He had to remind himself to be honest, to stand his ground. She had a way of making him a child again, the boy who needed to please her.

  “It’s steady,” he said, “and it’s in Davis Square, right by us.” He said it casually, concentrated on the path as if it were a racetrack, stonewalling.

  “So you’re not teaching?”

  “I might pick up a course in the fall if there’s overflow.”

  “What about Merck?”

  “That was just a onetime thing.”

  Her mouth was set, and he could see she was thinking, disappointed that she was learning this after the fact. They were almost to their balls, and she let him dangle. Over the years he’d gotten better at anticipating her objections, cataloging her tactics—not that it did him any good. It only meant he could see what was coming from farther away, giving him longer to worry. He consoled himself, thinking someone with less of a conscience would have sidestepped her long ago. Lise was right, he was the good son, the lifelong martyr.

  He parked the cart halfway between them.

  “I think you’re away,” he offered, and while she set herself he tried to remember why this was supposed to make breaking Meg’s idea easier. His mother would resent having to justify herself just as much as he did. She’d do it though, painful as it was, because, like him, she thought he deserved an answer. On the phone they might evade each other, relying on silence and omission, but not here. They wouldn’t change each other’s minds, though it had happened in the past. It was enough that they let their desires be known.

  His mother lobbed a decent-looking iron at the green. “Get up!” she said, stepping back, but it didn’t, stopping on the ramp of apron between the two sand traps.

  “What was that?”

  “A six. I didn’t hit it.”

  “It’s safe,” he said. And to prove it, dropped his seven, plop, in the right-hand trap.

  “Is it salaried at least?” she said in the cart.

  “Hourly.”

  “Good benefits?”

  “No.”

  It’s actually a pretty crappy job, he wanted to say. To be completely honest, I hate it.

  “I take it Lisa’s working then.”

  “Her job’s got the benefits.”

  “Who looks after the children?”

  “We both do,” he said, though what she meant was: Who looks after them after school, when you’re both at work? He preempted her, explaining that Ella had taken the baby-sitting course offered by the Red Cross.

  He blasted a sand wedge on. She chipped close but ended up two-putting.

  “Hit the ball, Emily,” she said. “I know Ella’s responsible, but Sam’s what, ten?”

  “He’ll be eleven next month.”

  In the cart they sparred over his old choices, the neighborhood they couldn’t afford, the lost jobs and useless degrees, and he was relieved to stop at the tee. She hopped out after him as if he were running away.

  “And why am I just finding all this out now?”

  The sixth was a par-three, a straight shot across a pond, and the foursome in front of them was still finishing up, making them wait. She had him. The conversation had gone as he expected, reached its inevitable destination, and yet he dreaded admitting he’d lied, though they both knew his reasons. While he accepted his penance, it seemed a double punishment, unnecessary.

  He selected a club and rolled his eyes—his entire head, as if it tired him—appealing to their familiarity and the shallowness of chat, trying to make it into a joke.

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “You knew you’d have to eventually. Maybe you thought you were buying time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What am I supposed to say?” she said. “That I’m happy you’re working at all?”

  “No.”

  “I wish I could say I’m surprised.”

  She made her voice tired and dispirited, when minutes before they’d been trading punch lines, and Ken readied himself. Her concerns were the same he’d been hearing since he’d gotten married. He needed to be a responsible adult. He needed to think about the children. Even she was tired of hearing it, and she asked if he thought she ought to bother anymore. He let it pass, keeping it rhetorical. None of this was new, and none of it touched him, only the pointless repetition, the circle they turned in.

  Across the pond, they were putting the pin back in, scattering to their carts.

  It was still her honor, and she teed up by the right marker. He stood back, glad to relax for a minute, and when she turned to him after her practice swing, he needed to regroup.

  “Now honestly,” she said, “I want to know. Do you really think your photography is going to get you anywhere?”

  It was such a large question, asked so casually—almost objectively, as if she had no opinion—that he balked at answering.

  “Maybe I should put it another way. Does Lisa think it’s going anywhere?”

  She turned to the ball again as if she didn’t expect an answer, her mind taken up by the game. She was being cruel, he thought. Because she knew.

  6

  Arlene had only handed Justin over to Margaret and was about to resume her picture taking when Ella collapsed in the viewfinder with a cry, flinging her mallet aside as if shot. At first Arlene thought it was an act staged for her benefit, but when she lowered her camera, Ella was sitting in the grass, bent over the upturned sole of her foot, rocking and distraught.

  “Did a bee get you?”

  “Yes.” Ella gulped for breath, trying not to sob—probably afraid of looking like a baby with Sam there. “Stupid bee!” she said hatefully, outraged.

  Arlene had seen the same clenched-teeth heroics from hundreds of boys and girls injured at recess, and knew to treat it seriously.

  “All right, let’s find the stinger. You’re not allergic, are you?”

  “I don’t think so.” She’d never been stung before, she said, defeated, as if this had ruined her perfect record.

  The black nib was sticking from her skin like a whisker, easy to get at. While Sam told them how he’d been stung last summer, Arlene squeezed it between her thumbs and the barb slid out cleanly, a miniature thorn, along with a drop of clear fluid that might have been venom. “There we are. Let’s get some ice on that.” She helped Ella up and walked her to the porch, propping her on one side, depositing her on the chaise.

  “Can I have a popsicle?” Ella asked, forlorn but recovered.

  “Of course.”

  “Can I have one too?” Sam asked. He’d followed them in, drawn by the excitement, and still had his mallet.

  Margaret came down to refill Justin’s ice pack and saw them. “It’s like a war zone around here,” she said, and went back to tend her patient.

  In a minute, Lisa appeared in a T-shirt and sweatpants to check on Ella. “I hear we had a major catastrophe.”

  She squatted to examine Ella’s foot, then thanked Arlene for taking care of her, grabbed something from the kitchen and disappeared upstairs. Arlene couldn’t imagine how warm it was up there under the eaves. She was already roasting from being in the sun.

  It must have been the effect of Ella being stung, because when she looked out on the yard, it was a city of bees whizzing an inch above the grass, crawling over the clover blossoms, filling their sacs with pollen.

  She stayed with Ella, leafing through Tuesday’s Post-Journal as the children nursed their popsicles in bowls. An accident on the Southern Tier had killed a woman. There were forest fires in Idaho and a heat wave lay over the Plains. Here, in the shade of the porch, the song of a motorboat coming across the water, the news seemed more than two days removed, the world distant, and yet—she couldn’t explain—more real, as if she herself was not part of any ongoing life while she was here, was even more powerless to prevent these tragedies. The paper could have been from ten years ago, or next year, and with the pleasure of settling into a hot bath she recog
nized the timelessness she wanted from Chautauqua. She felt her head clear, her sinuses open, and gave in to an invigorating shiver of satisfaction.

  “Aunt Arlene!” Ella cried, pointing at her. “You’re bleeding!”

  She looked down in time to see a fat drop splash on the page she was reading, and brought a hand to her face. Her nose was gushing.

  She tipped her head back and tasted it thick in the back of her throat.

  “Just a nosebleed,” she said, not wanting to frighten them (Walter’s father had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, one minute complaining of a headache, the next exploding into his oatmeal). “I’m fine. One of you bring me a tissue, please.”

  Sam ran inside with his popsicle.

  “Must be all the excitement,” she told Ella, and had to swallow, the taste unpleasantly rich.

  Sam brought back a box and Margaret, who took over, adding a constant, reassuring patter, cooing to her as if she might be afraid.

  “I guess they’re right,” Arlene said. “These things come in threes.”

  The tissues soaked up the color—always shocking, so vivid. Margaret brought out the wastebasket from the downstairs bath. Arlene could feel her upper lip crusting over, growing itchy, and wanted to wash her face. She wished the children would leave. She didn’t want them to see her like this, powerless (she would never let her students, for several reasons), but knew they needed to to make sure she was okay. She thought she was done at one point and lowered her head, only to provoke another flood. She finished the box of tissues and Margaret ripped open a second.

  “Maybe if you lie down for a while,” Margaret suggested, and for everyone’s sake Arlene went inside and let herself be put to bed, setting her sunglasses on the night table, laying a towel under her neck.

  “I’ll look in on you,” Margaret promised, and shut the door.

  Arlene felt unfairly banished, as if she’d done it for the attention, her plans sabotaged. For years she’d heard her older colleagues joke about going through their second childhoods, and here she was, a girl confined to her room. She remembered how terrible it was to be sick in the summer when she was little, knowing Henry and their friends were playing Belgian fort and kick the can in the alley while she was stuck in bed. For hours she lay imprisoned, unattended, with the blinds drawn and luffing in the weak breeze, watching the light color the ceiling, thinking miserably, as she did now: But it’s such a nice day.