by Heidi Pitlor
MacNeil seemed lost in a painting of curved lines against a pale blue background and Ellen wondered what the significance was, whether this was a painting that had meant something to him and Vera. The book was enormous in his hands, and a luxury, really, a book like this. It should have been enough for a person to look at art in a museum. Why was it necessary to own such a book, a book that cost, Ellen had noticed with some alarm, seventy-five dollars?
He did not love her outside of his grief. And perhaps she did not love him.
“A toast.” Joe lifted his glass of water, and everyone turned to look at him. “To me,” he said, “and to all of you making it here this weekend.”
“To our growing family,” said Jake, and Liz dropped her fork. The clink startled everyone, and Jake’s face flushed. He took a long sip of wine.
“It’s all right,” said Brenda, her eyes fixed on her plate.
Ellen couldn’t think of a thing to say that would make the moment pass more quickly.
“I didn’t mean that,” Jake said. He swallowed the rest of his wine and refilled his glass.
Brenda pushed her hands against the sides of her face and squeezed her mouth forward.
“Do you want to go lie down, sweetheart?” Ellen asked her, but she mumbled, “Everyone please just ignore me. Really, I’m fine.” Her accent sounded more pronounced.
“Of course,” Ellen said, and looked down. The food on her plate became terribly unappetizing.
“Tell us what would be best for you, Bren,” Jake said. “Do you need some time alone? It’s a nice walk down on the beach.” Hilary shot him an annoyed glance. Brenda kept her eyes on her plate, and Jake plowed ahead. “It must have been devastating. It must be incredibly painful for you to be here right now.” He believed he was so sensitive to other people’s needs, and that he, more than anyone, knew what was best for everyone in the family because he paid so much attention to his own army of needs. What had she and Joe done, Ellen wondered, to foster this in him?
“Perhaps I’ll talk about it later, but I’m not quite ready now. I’m sorry.”
Thankfully, Joe began to ramble about some book he was reading, and Liz eagerly joined him. The two chattered on while the rest of the family ate quietly. And when they’d exhausted this conversation, a silence swelled.
“I’m staying here on the island,” Hilary suddenly announced. “I’m not going back home with you and Dad.” Six pairs of eyes looked at her. “Liz agreed to let me stay here in this house until I find a place of my own.”
“She did?” Jake’s lips were lined in blue from the wine.
“I did,” Liz said, calmly slicing her meat.
Ellen stared at her daughter, now vigorously rubbing her fingers together. Perhaps she would finally start a fire. Perhaps she would light the house on fire and they would all rise up in smoke.
“Oh, well then,” Joe said.
“That’s all you can say?” Jake snorted. “Oh? Well?” He turned to Hilary. “Have you thought about how you are going to support yourself? How you are going to take care of a child alone here? Who’s going to help you? How you’ll afford to live? And what winters are like here? Have you considered any of this?”
“I knew you’d say these things,” Hilary responded, a spot of potato on her chin. “I shouldn’t have told you. I shouldn’t have said a fucking thing until I got settled here.”
Ellen had to restrain herself from leaning forward and wiping her daughter’s face. “Shh, please,” she hissed. Her temples throbbed. “Hil, does the man even know you’ve decided this? Does his wife?”
Brenda glanced around and traded a look with Daniel. Joe stared at his plate.
“Who are you talking about?” Hilary barked.
The beast was out of the cage now—what was the point in whispering around it anymore? “The father of your child, for God’s sake.”
“He doesn’t have a wife, Mom.”
“Then why won’t you tell us who he is? I assumed … I mean I guessed—”
“Because I don’t know who he is, all right? And he doesn’t know who he is because there were two different men and it could be either, and this only happened because I’m an irresponsible slut.”
Ellen shuddered. Did the others know this? Had Joe known and kept it from her because he figured she wouldn’t be able to handle it? And the answer—was it better or worse than she’d thought it would be?
“It’s okay, Hil,” Daniel said. “You’re not a bad person.”
Liz reached forward and squeezed Hilary’s shoulder.
Two men. Ellen looked at her daughter. Her face and neck flushed as she drank a half glass of lemonade in one gulp, then slammed the glass on the table.
Others were suddenly talking about the food and the wine.
Ellen finally made herself say, “So you’ll live here for a while.”
“She won’t be that far away from you, and she’ll be closer to us,” Liz said hopefully, to which Ellen automatically replied, “But she’ll be all alone here.”
“And that’s the real problem, isn’t it, Mom, that you can’t picture a person, worse yet a parent, really living alone? You can’t stand loneliness and you’re lonely with Dad because you think he doesn’t pay enough attention to you, which, by the way, he does, but that’s why you’re going to the Gardner Museum next week with some other man.” Her face bloomed red again.
Ellen planted her hands on either side of her plate. Joe looked at Hilary. Liz glared at her plate. Daniel puffed out his cheeks as if he were about to blow into a trumpet.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Hilary said in a loud voice, a voice complicit and selfish and full of uninformed anger. The spot of potato finally fell from her face. “I’m really sorry.”
As she stood, a flood rising within her, Ellen regarded her family around her. “I have plans with MacNeil Burgess to go to the Gardner Museum next week,” she said as if in time to a metronome. “He has been our friend, and Vera was my good friend for many years and she recently passed away.”
Hilary glared at her, waiting for her to continue. Joe looked at her blankly. He did not know her as a whole person. None of her family did and it angered her, how little they knew of her soul—that thing she’d ignored for so long—and the larger things it craved, and how little they cared. For she knew each of them inside and out. She had known them since they were born, and how they cried, and what it took to comfort them, what they loved to eat, to see, to smell, to hear, and later, what made them laugh and shudder and sleep. And as for Joe, Ellen knew him all too well. She knew how he took his tea, that he woke at six-fifteen every morning, alarm clock or not, and let himself doze for fifteen minutes. That he loved certain animals because of their quiet, and loved children because of their innate energy and curiosity. He loved her because she was his wife, because she was there beside him and had been for most of their days, every single morning and evening. Because in life, one was supposed to love, and one was supposed to love one’s wife, and that was enough for him. She knew him as an old man and had known him as a younger one, a new husband and new father, a manager of a car lot. Though there was, of course, another person that she barely remembered anymore, her first Joe, the boy she first met on her way home from the hospital. She desperately missed the clearer memories of the day they met. She missed the strength of her attraction to him, and the enormous promise of it—she couldn’t even recall what that felt like. Bits of the day had faded with time and no longer seemed to exist. She missed the exciting uncertainty of that day and of so many after, the sense that time was a vast, uncrossable galaxy that had no other side.
“I’m well aware that your mother and MacNeil are friendly,” Joe said calmly. Ellen felt herself wobble a little, a fork in one hand, a napkin in the other. The faces around the table softened. “Vera was her good friend, after all. And I’m well aware how much she loves the Gardner.”
“Your father knows that MacNeil has been grieving and has turned to his friends for comfort,” sh
e finally said, but how much did Joe know? What was there to know about the matter in the first place? The facts were these: She was helping a friend weather the passing of his wife. She herself had been mourning the passing of this dear friend. There was nothing else she could name about the matter right now that seemed at all consequential.
Brenda hung her head like a young girl. Everything seemed to be spinning and Ellen felt weightless, and steadied herself on the back of the chair. Vera was gone. Ellen’s unborn grandchild had died. Her son sat broken in a wheelchair. Her daughter would live her life alone. Ellen’s forehead had grown warm. She felt Jake’s hand on her arm and Hilary’s on her leg, gently pulling her to the side and then down. Ellen let herself sink slowly back into her seat, and landed with a small whump.
—
Jake exhaled. It seemed that he’d been holding his breath for hours, and, his face damp, he reached for his glass of wine. Something had popped in the family. Where had Hilary gotten this nonsense? Their mother, another man—it was ridiculous. She was an old woman about to become a grandmother. And she loved his father. Of course she had male friends. Of course she and Joe argued and ignored each other, but what married couple didn’t? Hilary simply didn’t understand the nature of long-term relationships. She ran from conflict, as she was too stubborn to work through it or wait it out—and look at her. Emotionally, she hadn’t grown a day over the years. And now she would be a mother and Liz had promised her their house without even asking him. Hilary managed to coast over life’s speed bumps, always rallying someone else to take care of her.
“You know, Hil, I don’t much like the Gardner,” Joe suddenly said. “It’s a little dusty for me, and a little too quiet. Your mother knows I can’t walk all those stairs anymore.”
Ellen nodded and smiled, and Jake sensed his parents were tacitly agreeing to something. He finished the wine in his glass and poured himself more. “You took us to the Museum of Fine Arts once on a snow day, Mom,” he said. “Remember? We dug out the car and slid our way to the city. That drive scared the hell out of me—we kept spinning out, and nicked the guardrail at one point. When we got to the museum, we were the only people there except the security guards, and you told us to pretend this was our house and that we were princes, I think it was, and that you were the queen. Daniel’s bedroom was the one with the Van Gogh sketches, right? And mine was the one with all these ancient sculptures.”
“I did?” Ellen said. “How inspired of me.”
“I don’t remember that,” Hilary said, and Jake said, “It might have been before you were born. Dan, do you remember?”
Daniel didn’t respond, and Jake wasn’t certain he’d even heard his question. Daniel had barely said a thing since they arrived. His hair was a mess, and he looked as if hadn’t slept for days, which he probably hadn’t. Jake grew a little weak in the stomach just looking at him.
“I remember that snow day,” Joe said. “I stayed home and worked, but I remember you three coming back all abuzz like you’d just visited some other country.”
Liz stood and walked the tray of meat around the table, offering each person more. She smiled flatly at him and Jake felt a rush of gratitude for her. She would not have fallen in love with him, he thought, if they had met earlier, say in high school. He remembered her old sketchbooks that he’d found about a year ago in their attic when he was looking for a hose. The first book he’d opened contained childlike drawings of adults above her parents’ names, and other names he didn’t recognize. The lines were messy, the colors ridiculous. Eyes were crossed and ears were drawn to look like wings. He recognized her trademark humor and the comic way she really saw people. And she was just as methodical as a child as she was now—she’d even dated each page. Her self-portraits back then were adorable: an enormous head, eyes practically on top of each other (still a hang-up for her), an absurdly long nose, puffy lips, tiny hands, an egg-shaped body. He flipped through her drawings as a six-, seven-, eight-year-old. He looked at her friends, then her parents lifting those idiotic hookahs to their mouths. He flipped through her adolescence, past boys drawn with less exaggeration and more details. Standing in the dim light of the attic, Jake stopped at a drawing of a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, angelic-looking boy named Gregory Peacock. The boy was rendered much more realistically than the others, and the skill she had as an eleven-year-old was remarkable. When Jake looked closer, he noticed faint pencil marks beneath the marker lines so straight they must have been drawn with a ruler. Gregory Peacock appeared on several more pages with her parents, next to animals, beside a tree, caped and flying through the air—this was Jake’s favorite. He’d undoubtedly been her first love, her earliest, purest desire, and after looking closely at all the drawings of the boy, Jake found himself flipping through blank pages until he reached a piece of mole-colored cardboard at the end of the book. She’d stopped with Gregory Peacock in Flight, December 14, 1977. She’d been eleven years old. Jake set down the diary and picked up the next, which resumed on April 21, 1988, when she was twenty-two. He tried but was unable to find the journal that covered the missing ten years. She’d most likely skipped them. And from April 21, 1988, onward the drawings were completely different. They were harder and less playful, and infused with a more critical eye. Lines were more angular, expressions more serious. She no longer drew her parents, and the boys became larger, leaner. None smiled or even looked to be moving. Certainly none flew. Jake flipped through pictures of a pudgier Liz hidden beneath long, straight hair, her hands always clasped together. He saw pictures of her next to young men with facial hair—and why, at that age, did everyone hide behind their hair? These young men wore dark clothing and unhappy expressions—their pouts and brows and sneers became the exaggerated aspects of her drawing. Jake wished he could have seen pictures of the missing years, for he thought he might have learned something important about Liz from them. Eventually the pages led to him, a tall, skinny young man wearing a broad smile. He’d never seen these pictures of himself. Liz had shown him later sketches, but never these, and he examined the freer lines, the pliability of his fingers and toes and lips and eyes, and thought he did offer something, after all the hard lines of those dour boys. Something lighter. But not as light as Gregory Peacock. Not as pretty or as studied as that young, yellow-haired, flawless boy. She’d drawn Jake’s glasses, his enormous brown eyes behind them, and his wide mouth, his smile as big as a slice of watermelon across his face. He looked cartoonish, he thought. Silly almost. Soon enough there she was beside him, her hair shorter and fuller, a water-melonlike smile on her face too, and they looked like cartoons of two children, brother and sister almost, smiling up at him with no idea what was in front of them. There was none of the care, none of the erased lines or detail that her earlier drawings had. Jake never told her he’d found these journals—he wasn’t entirely certain that he’d want to hear what she might say about them.
Fuck Gregory Peacock, he murmured to himself. He sighed. He was tipsy and well on his way to drunk. “I’m getting drunk,” he said, though it seemed no one heard him.
Hilary’s fork scraped her plate. He supposed it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she stayed at his house—he just hoped she wouldn’t do something careless and burn down the place. Perhaps he could introduce her to the shop owners and the other summer homeowners they knew here. Perhaps someone could hire her to do something. She’d appreciate that—and she’d appreciate him for doing it. She’d have to. He could help her get her feet on the ground, and after all, she would be on the East Coast now. Not across the country. Not in their parents’ house, as Liz had told him was her earlier plan, reliving her youth. It was a start, at least.
Ellen had a faraway look on her face—she was probably still thinking about the MFA.
“I loved loved loved pretending that museum was our house,” Jake said, aware that his words had slurred from his mouth. “It felt kind of sad, pulling into our little driveway after a snow day there.”
“Well, be ha
ppy you had a driveway,” his father said. This was a version of his clichéd refrain, especially when they were younger and Jake and his mother played their game of imagining the great things they would buy if they had a million dollars.
“Of course, Dad,” Jake said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a little drunk.”
“If I could have bought you all the Gardner, I would have.” It sounded almost as if he were mocking them.
Jake wondered what his father thought the first time he saw their wrought-iron gates and the long driveway lined in dogwoods and the groomed lawns at their house in Portland. On that morning they first visited, Jake had been so busy chatting with his mother he hadn’t paid much attention to Joe. Now, when Jake thought of it, he remembered the man fidgeting with his sweater sleeve, looking around and above himself as if he had just landed on the moon. Jake refilled his wineglass and took a long sip. Wasn’t his father at all proud?
—
Evidently Hilary knew nothing about her mother or father as people separate from the family. She knew nothing about anyone in the end, only what she thought she knew. Her accusation seemed only to draw her parents closer. And her mother’s reaction to her admission about her baby’s father. A married man! Well, Ellen certainly could’ve thought worse—was she now thinking that the two possible fathers were brothers, or criminals, that Hilary conceived the baby during conjugal visits at San Quentin? Ellen sat wilted in her chair, overwhelmed. She seemed to have grown grayer, and her eyes droopier just over dinner. Hilary glanced at the clock on the wall. It was only six-thirty. Was it possible to age visibly in just two hours? She now regretted saying anything at all. Later, she would take her mother aside and apologize for doubting her and tell her that she would visit her and her father often, and to keep that guest room ready for her.
But she would also say that she still didn’t understand the tone of her mother’s voice in those moments over the phone, and what all that secrecy between her and MacNeil was about, and why the mention of love? Why did her mother need to call him and tell him about this weekend? Was he really just a friend, and if he was, did that make things any better? Hilary guessed that certain friendships lasted longer and plunged deeper than many marriages.
