“That sounds great,” Pam said. “Let me just get the kids on board.”
When I was a kid, we were simply placed on board, but I was quickly learning that that’s not how it works anymore. Life with children is one long lobbying campaign, not only on the hard stuff like homework and household chores but also on what should have been the fun stuff. Some kids have so many appealing options these days that they need help getting excited about anything anymore.
I heard nothing, then still nothing, and I hesitated about asking. A few days out, Pam, harried, told me on the phone, “The kids really want to have a relaxing weekend around the house. I think they’re so sick of running back and forth between their father’s and here, they just want to stay put.”
I knew, Pam knew, that the kids could have had an exquisitely relaxing weekend in Maine, only with the ocean thrown into the mix, and clam shacks and cool breezes and sand castles, as well as an outdoor shower and freeze pops on the back deck overlooking the woods. But how do you convince a couple of vocal, strong-willed kids of something that they don’t yet know? And how do you prevail upon their mother, by nature a conciliator, not a dictator, to take matters into her own hands? The answer, if you’re me, meaning the outsider in this closely held group, was simple: you don’t.
“We don’t want to hold you up,” Pam told me sincerely. “If you had your heart set on Maine, you should go. You’ve been under so much pressure at work, you could use the time up there.”
All that was true, right down to having my heart set on Maine. But I wanted to demonstrate my commitment to this new life, to show that I was capable of thinking of something outside my own skin, as aberrant as that was for me. So I stayed put, determined to make the best of it and not think about my vacant slice of Nirvana to the north.
There was something else at play in my decision to stay, something as real as it was difficult to grasp. I would regularly bemoan all that those kids—and many, many others like them—were given in this life, whether it be sizable houses or virtually every toy that they momentarily desired or vacations to exotic places and luxury resorts. Hope, ambition, gratitude, and wonder lose proportion when you have so much so young. But there was a burden they carried on the other side of life’s ledger and that many of their friends did as well, a burden most from my childhood didn’t have to confront: divorced parents.
Both girls were reasonably cognizant when their mother and father parted ways. Suddenly Mom was in a house ten minutes away, and soon enough, that rental house became one of their two homes. They were old enough, and certainly astute enough, to see that Mom and Dad were two very different people who didn’t get along particularly well. Still, I have no doubt that they harbored the common view and dream of a joyous reunion, everyone together again in the old happy home. My presence, of course, ruined their ability to dream that dream. I was, despite my best efforts, an inherent part of the confusion that must have been unfolding in their minds. Add to that the daily complications of being the products of divorced parents. There were complicated schedules that baffled even me in terms of who was where on this Wednesday or next, or which house on which Monday holiday, or the number of back-and-forths over the annual Christmas-to-New-Year’s break. There were different rules in each house, different moods, different expectations. Every few days, they were moving, packing bags, kissing animals good-bye, bidding their mother teary farewells. No wonder they wanted to stay put.
On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, there was near-record heat. It wasn’t just a little hot but blistering hot, a shock to your system, which was more used to the cool spring temperatures of New England. Young Abigail awoke hell bent on fishing, and there wasn’t a cuter kid, or a more inspiring vision, than that nine-year-old in tall rubber boots and shorts, a ballcap pulled low over her head, explaining the new casting strategy she wanted to unveil that day. She tied her own knots. She handled her own worms. When she caught a fish, she gamely grabbed it in her two hands and pulled the hook out of its mouth.
So we were off after breakfast, in pursuit first of bait and then of a place to cast it, adults in the front, the kids in the middle row, and the two excited dogs panting from the back of Pam’s SUV. If any vision of Chevy Chase in the movie Vacation entered my mind, I quickly batted it out. The day took us farther into exurbia, to towns I had never been in before, and I thought I had been just about everywhere. We stopped at gas stations looking for bait, sporting goods stores, and finally at a massive Walmart superstore, where we found success. The two kids and their mother returned to the car not only with a Styrofoam container of worms but also with directions to a fishing hole that had garnered rave reviews from the knowledgeable people inside.
“It’s going to be the best fishing we’ve ever had,” Abigail announced.
Not that I was keeping track, but we had already been in the car for an hour—just enough time to have gotten us to the Maine border. The nameless pond was supposed to be about twenty minutes away, so off we went.
About forty minutes later, we were still looking. The kids were getting hungry. The dogs, in the way back, were panting up a storm. The driver was getting (uncharacteristically) frustrated. The mother was trying to hold everything together. “Perfect weather for fishing,” Pam said.
Finally, mercifully, we came across a body of water upon whose shores some older men were sitting in folding chairs holding rods and reels. I swerved to the side of a relatively busy road. The dogs were agitated, thinking they were going swimming. The kids, particularly Abigail, were hesitant, theorizing that the lake didn’t look as though it held much promise. The sun was pounding down. Cars were flying by.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, my gaze looking past the discarded soda cans and candy wrappers that had been tossed into the water by obnoxious motorists. “Let’s just give it a little try,” I said, and I swear, I think my voice might have cracked from the pressure.
Mercifully, everyone agreed. I calmed the dogs down. Pam walked the kids across the street, looking adorable with their rods slung over their little shoulders. We found a stretch of shore that seemed to have a little less muck and litter than anywhere else, Abigail and Pam tied worms to the lines, and they cast.
It was amazing to me how insects so large, so bulbous from feasting on human blood, could fly so quickly and sting so sharply as the omnipresent mosquitoes and green-heads that seemed to be having a convention at this roadside pond just west of nowhere. Abigail gamely continued to cast, the hook pretty much coming within an inch of my eyes on every toss. The traffic seemed heavy for a holiday Sunday. And Caroline began to have a meltdown about twenty minutes after we got there, which was actually fine, because I was at risk of having one myself. The fish, not for nothing, were all somewhere else.
I was trying my level best to live in the moment, to revel in exactly where we were. But it was suffocating. I actually felt short of breath, and my mind kept roaming north, to Maine, to the soft fields and wide open stretches of Goose Rocks Beach. Had we left this morning at the same time we had embarked on this fishing expedition, we would not only have been there, but we also could have changed into our bathing suits and been standing knee deep in refreshing ocean water, a salty breeze whispering through our hair.
“Owwww! Shit!” That was Pam, smacking her palm against her neck to kill an insect so heavy it actually made a sound when it fell dead to the ground. Caroline had her head down, basically accepting her miserable plight. Somebody beeped from a pickup truck and yelled, “You got a fishing license?”
“We need to get some food in you,” Pam said to Caroline, her hand absently rubbing her back, and just like that, after a ninety-minute ride, after no more than thirty minutes of fishing, we packed up the tackle boxes, the cooler, the worms, and the rods and trudged through the heat back to the car. I started to wonder, with no small amount of fear, what was on tap for the next day.
“It’s all about blood sugar levels,” Pam explained in the front seat as Caroline balled up in he
r car seat behind us. “Kids need to eat constantly, or the levels plunge and they crash. It’s my fault for not bringing more food.”
Next stop was a Bertucci’s about ten minutes down the road. If there’s a more depressing place than a chain pizza restaurant in the middle of a ninety-five-degree afternoon on a holiday weekend, I hadn’t been there yet, though I was sure I’d see it soon, maybe even tomorrow.
The waitress was perky. Caroline was despondent. Abigail was frustrated about not catching fish. Pam was apologetic. And I was doing my level best not to scream for help, for someone, anyone, to take me by the hand and show me the way back to my once straightforward life.
One thing I was slowly learning is that as quickly as things unravel, they can come back together all over again. Best I can tell, tantrums and episodes leave no residue. As Caroline got food into her system, her adorable face began to rise. She was coming back to life, and it was kind of amazing to witness.
“Hey, Abs,” she said, chewing on the piece of bruschetta that she was waving in her hand. “We should have thrown the line out farther into the lake. That’s where the fish are.”
Abigail agreed, providing her veteran analysis on why the fish hadn’t come close to shore: they had undoubtedly been avoiding all the litter that clogged the little dirt beach. Maybe next time we should rent a canoe, or even a little motorboat, to take us farther out and into more fertile ground.
“Maybe we can go again tomorrow,” she said, Caroline nodding, as if everyone had had a perfectly wonderful time.
When we finally got home that afternoon (we could have been tucking into soft-serve cones at the Goose Rocks Dairy in Maine), the kids leaped from the car, shouting, “Buddy, Buddy!” as the bird bounced down from the front stoop and greeted them in the yard with every one of her clucks and caws.
“You were so good to wait for us,” Caroline said.
“We love you, Buddy,” Abigail told the bird.
Ah, to be that bird.
After I lugged Pam’s air conditioners up from the basement and we wedged them into the windows, after I told two exhausted kids a bedtime story about a magic beach ball that floated from Maine all the way to Greenland, I sat in Pam’s kitchen mindlessly spooning Brigham’s chocolate chip ice cream into my sunburned face. Pam walked in, quietly, sleepy-eyed, wearing her trademark scrubs and T-shirt.
“Not what you had in mind for your Memorial Day weekend, I know,” she said.
She was absolutely right, but there was no polite way to agree, so with uncharacteristic tact, I remained quiet.
“Sometimes this is just what it is to have kids,” Pam said. “You go with the flow, even when it’s not flowing anywhere you would normally want to be.” She paused to push her hair out of her face and added, “Believe it or not, the kids had a fun day today, because they were with us, and even if they don’t say it, some part of them appreciates the fact that you were there for them.”
She kissed me softly on the lips and headed up to bed, leaving me in the netherworld between the old and the new, between selfishness and selflessness, between what I had and what I wanted. The next day, we would get up and do it all over again, and the day after that, and the week after that, and the year after that.
Was I ready? Were they?
I staggered over to the couch, stretched out, and imagined that the window fan was an ocean breeze in Maine.
12
I pulled up to Pam’s house one summer’s eve to an all-American scene—well, an all-American scene plus a pampered chicken. The kids were trotting and galloping around the front yard, leaping over miniature painted horse jumps set up along an elaborate course. The two dogs were sprawled in the grass, taking stock of another hard day of being canine. And Pam was cradling Buddy in her arms as she ran her hands up and down her feathers. Something in the way she was looking at Buddy—inspecting her, really—made me ask if everything was all right, and I tried my level best to hide any hint of hope in my voice.
“Go look at the note from the cleaning lady on the top of the refrigerator,” Pam replied, her voice as flat as a board.
In an otherwise clean house, I found a barely legible, three-line note written on the back of a discarded envelope that said, “We fed some cheese to your rooster. Hope it’s okay. Back in two weeks.”
I pushed open the screen door and sat on the stoop beside Pam, just far enough away that the bird couldn’t peck my eyes out. “I don’t get it,” I said. “I thought Buddy liked cheese.”
Pam shot me a look of mild annoyance. Then she lowered her voice so the kids couldn’t hear and said, “The rooster part. Didn’t you see she called Buddy a rooster?”
I hadn’t noticed, but what’s the big deal? To some people, probably to most people, the words are interchangeable. Rooster, hen, chicken, dinner—they’re all an unholy mess.
“They don’t know the difference,” I said.
Pam may well be the smartest person I have ever met, with an outsized brain on constant overdrive tucked inside a very attractive head. If her mind were a lightbulb, it would actually be a floodlight. She graduated near the top of her class from the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated near the top of her class from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. But what was most impressive about her, what set her apart from any other person I’ve ever met with that kind of intellectual wattage, was that she was well aware of what she didn’t know.
That became apparent yet again when she said, “The cleaning lady is from Brazil. Brazilians know the difference between roosters and hens.”
As she spoke, her hands kept traversing the very happy bird, feeling the comb on his/her head, his/her wattle, his/her narrow frame, and—good God—his/her private area. “Chickens have all their genitalia on the inside, so it’s impossible to tell,” Pam said matter-of-factly, still in a low voice.
“She’s never crowed in the morning,” I said.
“I know. That’s good. But maybe she just hasn’t started yet. Now I’m thinking of every little sound she makes, these strange little barks I’ve heard lately.” She paused again, held the chicken slightly away from her as they gazed bizarrely into each other’s eyes, and said, “The kids will be devastated.”
Yes, they would. I could already picture the scene: Abigail and Caroline giving good old Buddy one last kiss on the side of his manly little face as Pam placed him in the car and drove off to Happy Acres Poultry Farm, where he would live out his life exactly as he should—in the company of a couple of hundred other chickens, eagerly performing his roosterly duties in the name of commerce and the future of the flock. The kids would cry. The bird would be clucking. I’d have to tell everyone that he’s going to have a great life with all his little chicken friends, then I’d help wipe away the tears, bring them inside, and heat up some chicken fingers for lunch.
“Why are you smiling?” Pam suddenly asked.
Huh? What? “Oh, I, uh, was just thinking about all the good times the kids have had with Buddy. I’m sure they’ll go on for another fifteen years.”
“God, I hope so,” she said. And she said it like she meant it, the scariest part of all.
“How do you find out about the sex for sure?” I asked.
Pam put Buddy on the ground. She stared at me for a long moment and let out an aggressive-sounding squawk—the bird, not the girlfriend. Then she turned around and trotted off toward the kids in that side-to-side dinosaur gait that she had.
“You wait and see if she starts sprouting a crown and begins crowing, which could be any day now. Or you do a sexing test.”
I didn’t even want to know.
It’s not every day that a chicken struts into the refined environs of the Back Bay Veterinary Clinic on fashionable Newbury Street in Boston, what with its exposed beams and espresso-colored walls and doctors who look as though they could be starring in a weekly television drama on Fox called Cats and Dogs. Pam’s clinic has had its share of exotic animals and other assorted pets with unusual
problems, ferrets, pythons, a macaw, an iguana that swallowed its master’s underwear. But a chicken, even a Rhode Island White that could have been on the cover of Martha Stewart Living? No, a chicken was breaking new ground for this city clinic.
Pam loaded Buddy into the car that morning, which was not difficult because Buddy had become something of a fan of Sunday drives—or any-day-of-the-week drives, for that matter. She would settle on a pile of quilts that Pam had placed on the front passenger seat for the dual purpose of making her comfortable and giving her enough height to gaze out the window at the shocked and amused motorists in the other cars. Buddy probably didn’t even care what people were honking and pointing at.
At the clinic, the vets and the techs cooed at Buddy far more than she cooed back at them. She peered around suspiciously with a look that said, What the hell am I doing here? Pam carried her back to the prep room, where an uncommonly capable doctor named Beth Waisburd and a smart and gentle technician named Kali Pereira were waiting with a textbook opened to the section that explained how to draw blood from a chicken. Ends up, the book explained, you have to hold the chicken upside down by the legs to make sure it doesn’t move or variously peck, and then insert the needle into its wings.
Okeydokey. Kali whisked her up in her arms, grabbed hold of her skinny, rubbery legs, and there she hung, shocked, confused, and defenseless as Beth found just the right place on her feathery wing to insert the needle. Just like that, it was done. The bird squawked. The staff smiled, and Buddy got a fresh bowl of cracked corn, which she ravenously pecked at on the floor of the clinic.
Buddy Page 11
