by James Tate
“Lloyd, can I get you a beer?” I asked to break the tension. I knew Joan didn’t drink, but I thought, away from the rest of the family, I might get Lloyd to loosen up.
He glanced at Joan sheepishly. “A brew sounds good.”
“Just one.” Joan informed him. “Well, Nikki, you look like you’ve lost weight since we saw you last summer. You haven’t been sick or anything have you?”
“Please, sit down, have a chair,” Nikki said. “No, I’ve been well. I always lose a couple of pounds in the summer. We’ve been swimming everyday. And we eat a lot lighter in the summers.”
“Tofutti,” Lloyd said.
“What was that, Uncle Lloyd?”
“Tofutti. Do you eat that new stuff, tofutti?”
“No,” Nikki laughed, “we’re not into fads. What’s this tofutti, I’ve never heard of it.”
“You see, you don’t know everything. Tofutti, some kind of health food, an ice cream substitute, and you’ve never heard of it. You see, Joan, they don’t know everything.”
I gave Lloyd his beer and Joan gave me one of her looks. She hated Noel’s painting. It was against everything she had ever stood for her whole life. Nudes in the living room, really.
We took them out to dinner that first night to an old, elegant country inn. It went well enough, except for the wine. They both thought we were affected and unnatural for not drinking coffee with our meal. But we had decided that we should be ourselves and stop apologizing for who we were. We asked them a lot of questions about their three kids, all grown now, and we talked about Nikki’s parents and my parents. In fact, we talked about everything but ourselves. And they never asked us a single question about our lives. They had driven a long way to see us and, as far as they were concerned, they had seen enough. The trouble was that they had said they were staying a week.
Lloyd looked around the Inn and summed it up: “This looks like the kind of place you could make one of those horror films.” We didn’t respond so he amplified his meaning. “You know, an axe murderer, blood flowing down the staircases, I can just see it.”
“It’s very historic,” Nikki replied. “A lot of famous men have slept here.”
“Yeah, I bet. Like Jack the Ripper.” He roared at his own joke, and the maitre d’ looked our way with displeasure.
“Lloyd,” Joan said, “you’re embarrassing Charles and Nikki. You forget you’re not at home. People act differently here.”
“Are you asking me to change at my age? ’Cause if you are, darlin’, I got some real bad news for you.”
“Uncle Lloyd,” Nikki said, “Princess Grace of Monaco had lunch here a few years ago.”
“And look where it got her,” he said, choking at his own wit. “Like I said, a good horror picture could be made right here.
Don’t get me wrong, I like some of them pictures, too. Hell, I’d go see it.”
“Watch your language, Lloyd.” Joan said.
We were relieved to get back to the house. Lloyd and Joan were in bed by 9:30. Neither Nikki nor I could fall asleep that early. We talked in hushed voices for several hours, desperate for a plan.
When we got up the following morning at seven it was obvious that our guests had been awake for some time. They’d drunk one pot of coffee and Lloyd was complaining in his familiar jokey way about what a man had to do to get breakfast around this place.
“It’s a good thing you aren’t a farmer’s wife, Nikki, do you know that, little darlin’? Now what about some pancakes? You do know how to make pancakes, don’t you?”
“Of course I know, Uncle Lloyd, you just hold your britches on, and I’ll start breakfast in a few minutes.”
Joan offered to help in the kitchen, and Nikki accepted the offer, partly, I think, to give me a chance to wake up without her watchful eyes measuring my every scratch and wrinkle. I still couldn’t get over how different it was having them in our own house. They were like complete strangers to us, except that we knew their thoughts. Back home I could tease and joke with both of them, and they liked it. Here, I was afraid to josh with them in the same way.
“What do you want to see today, Lloyd? There’s a lot of old towns around here that might interest you. The birthplaces of six presidents are within a couple hours driving distance. We’ve got your Millard Filmore, your Calvin Coolidge.”
“Weak ones.”
“What’s that?”
“I said, you grow weak presidents in this part of the country. Hell, we didn’t drive all the way out here to visit Millard Filmore’s birthplace when we got Truman and Eisenhower practically next door at home.”
“Well,” I said, “we’ll let the ladies decide.”
“I know what Joan wants to do. She already told me this morning when you two were sleeping-in. She wants souvenirs, you know, to prove to her girlfriends back home that she was actually here. Souvenirs are the only way to make believers of them. Joan is practically obsessed with getting souvenirs on this trip. She already said she won’t be back in this lifetime, so I hope you know where they’ve got the best ones.”
“Well,” I said, “Living here as we do, I haven’t given the subject a whole lot of thought, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
Lloyd gave me a look at those words, and I revised myself in a hurry: “I don’t mean just something; we’ll definitely find the best place.”
And, after breakfast, we began our search for the best souvenirs in the area. We must have driven two-hundred miles in our effort to satisfy Joan’s quest. We stopped at fifteen or so such shops, and they all contained pretty much the same crap you would find in any part of the country. But this didn’t lessen Joan’s passion. She bought three or four items in each shop. She was consumed with concentration, and talked out-loud to herself as she browsed from table to table: “Hilary would just love this, Suzanne would get a kick out of this, wouldn’t she, Lloyd? Bill and Yvonne love little things like this.” It caught me off guard how suddenly she delighted in risqué humor. Some of the tawdry junk even embarrassed me. Nikki and I mostly just stood there, pretending to examine racks of postcards. Twenty minutes to a shop, and then we’d barrel on down the highway a few miles until another such shop announced itself. We spent the entire day doing this, and both Lloyd and Joan seemed entirely satisfied. When Judgment Day comes, this day should not be held against me, as I did not really exist. Joan must have spent several hundred dollars on bric-a-brac, little outhouses, tomahawks, ashtrays, giant pens and stuff. The trunk was brim-full of her souvenirs, souvenirs from a place she hadn’t even seen. She had the glazed look of one who had waited a lifetime to play her trump card, and now that she had played it successfully, there was nowhere left to go. Nikki and I didn’t exist, and Lloyd was happy for her. Their trip was, in effect, over. She would count and recount her loot, imagining the responses she would get from Hilary, Suzanne and Yvonne.
“Maybe we could take them over to the Rudman’s potluck tomorrow night,” I said to Nikki in bed that evening. “They’re nice people, they wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh, Charles, I don’t know how we’re going to last five more days. They just don’t seem to have any curiosity about anything here.”
“One day at a time, Nikki. We’ll make it. I may be crazy by the time they go, but we’ll make it somehow. It doesn’t seem natural that we wouldn’t introduce them to some of our friends. They’ll go back home thinking we don’t have any.”
“Right now I’m not sure I care what they say about us, really. I always liked them so much. I can hardly believe I lived with them one whole summer. Their house was like a second home to me, and now I don’t know what to talk about with them.”
Elliott and Becca Rudman’s potluck supper was no different than any of a dozen such gatherings we had attended at their house, the same eighteen or twenty people, the same range of dishes—all good, if a trifle out-of-the-ordinary. Lloyd and Joan clung to our sides as though they had been warned about this kind of crowd, as though rare forms of vene
real diseases were transmitted by sneezes and handshakes at gatherings such as this one. Elliott Rudman tried to be the polite host, asking them where they lived and all the basics, but Lloyd was defensive and edgy and Elliott finally drifted away. I couldn’t blame him. I wanted nothing more than to hide, but I knew Nikki would kill me if I abandoned her. Joan was positively ogling.
“Are these people your friends?” she asked Nikki in a tone of withering scorn.
“Some of them. Others I hardly know. They’re perfectly nice people, Aunt Joan, really. That man over there is an anthropologist, and that woman there, her father is a leading heart surgeon.”
“I think they dress funny. Fifty year old women dressed like teenagers. Are they poor or what’s the problem?”
“Oh, no. Most of them are professional people. I guess it’s just the style here.”
“You call that style? I call it lack of style. Are they all atheists, too, I suppose?”
“Aunt Joan, as I told you, they’re very nice people. I don’t pry into other people’s religious views.”
“Humph,” was all Joan could say to that.
“Let’s get something to eat, what do you say, Lloyd? Are you hungry Joan? The food’s on the table out on the deck. Come on while the picking’s still good.”
“This ought to be good,” Lloyd said sarcastically. “This is the skinniest bunch of so-called adults I’ve seen since The Depression.”
Everybody but Joan and Lloyd seemed very happy with the variety of dishes. They stood around on the deck eating off paper plates and complimenting one another on what they had prepared. This was a seasoned bunch of potluckers and they gave thought to the dishes they had brought. When it came our turn to help ourselves, Lloyd and Joan looked utterly depressed and made no motions toward any of the offerings.
“What’s that?” Lloyd asked with obvious displeasure. People were beginning to watch us and listen to the rude comments our guests were making.
“Tabouli,” Nikki answered, in an upbeat voice. “Try some, Uncle Lloyd. It’s very healthy.”
“I’m already healthy,” he said. “What I am now is hungry.”
“Why don’t you just tell us what all this is,” Joan said, “and we’ll decide what’s eatable, okay?”
“Well,” Nikki said, looking around at the other guests looking at us, “this is spanakopita, a Greek spinach pastry.”
“A spinach pastry? Whatever happened to just plain old cream puffs.”
“And this is ratatouille, that’s a Mediterranean vegetable stew.”
“Where in the hell are we, anyway? Don’t you have hams in this part of the country?”
“Now, Lloyd,” Joan said, “don’t be rude.”
“And, let’s see, this must be falafel, that’s an Israeli chickpea croquette, very spicy and good. I bet you’d like that, Joan.”
“I’ve sort of lost my appetite, if you know what I mean. Where’s that thing you brought, Nikki? You made a strawberry shortcake, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I’d eat some of that,” Lloyd said. “At least we can eat dessert now and get a burger when we leave.”
“Actually, it’s a strawberry tort . . .”
“Tort, short, I don’t give a damn. At least it came from America, didn’t it?”
People were trying not to laugh at us. It was so obvious that both Nikki and I were miserable, trying to accommodate some distant relatives we barely knew.
We found Nikki’s tort and Lloyd and Joan took large slices for themselves.
“If you ask me,” Joan said too loudly, “Nikki made the best dish of everybody.”
Nikki’s face turned red, and we exchanged looks: this simply was not working, a bad idea. Silently, we agreed to leave as soon as Lloyd and Joan finished their dessert. The other guests made no attempt to talk with us now. Even Elliott and Becca gave us wide berth when they crossed the deck to join another group.
When Joan had cleaned her plate she told Nikki she had to go to the bathroom. Nikki told her where she could find it, but then Joan turned around after she had stood up and said to Nikki, loud enough for all to hear, “Watch my purse.”
When we woke the next morning there was a note left for us on the kitchen counter: THANKS FOR A WONDERFUL TIME, Love, Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Joan.
Trying to make Nikki feel better, I said: “I think they did have a good time. Joan got her souvenirs, and Lloyd will be telling stories about the Rudman’s potluck supper for years to come. Don’t feel bad. You’ll see, next summer they’ll have a thousand jokes at the picnic. And we’ll be teasing them. You’ll see, Nikki. That was the trip of their lives.”
EATING OUT OF MOUSETRAPS
I had become dependent on that one glass of wine every night to relax me,” Valerie was saying. “I couldn’t sleep without it. I rarely if ever had a second glass, but still it was a dependence, and that’s when I decided I had a problem.” Valerie sipped at her juice with a newfound moral authority that made her feel very good about herself. The other women at the table stared incredulously at her at first, and then shifted their eyes back to their drinks with sinking hearts. It was supposed to be a carefree evening, no men allowed. Now they sat in silence until Valerie regained her momentum.
“And that’s when I discovered AA. It is the most wonderful group of people I’ve ever met. Strangers come right up to you and say, ‘Hi, my name is Jack and I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘Nice to meet you,’ I say, ‘My name is Valerie and I’m an alcoholic.’ You’re accepted immediately; everyone’s so honest and personal. And you wouldn’t believe the variety of people, doctors, policemen, housewives, professors, artists, salesmen.”
The women at the table exchanged guarded looks with one another, not because they couldn’t believe that doctors and policemen could be alcoholics, but, well, one glass of wine?
Valerie continued: “You don’t have to tell your story to the group right away, but I wanted to, I wanted to get started on my recovery—though once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, you know. So I stood up and said, ‘Hello, my name is Valerie and I’m an alcoholic. I drink every night etc. etc.,’ and they applauded me and later that night they told me who my partner would be, the person I could call any time of night or day if I was tempted to take a drink.”
“The doctor, I hope,” Barbara said, attempting to lighten the mood.
“Well, no, I’m sorry to say I wasn’t that lucky. My partner, well, I can’t tell you her name. But I will tell you that it’s a woman and, boy, let me tell you, she’s one of the fattest, ugliest old sows you’ve ever set your eyes on. She worked at the mill for thirty years in Turner’s Falls, says she kept a pint of vodka in her purse, spiked Coke all day long, then drank herself into oblivion each night when she got home to her one room apartment. She had no living relatives that she knew of since her mother died when she was sixteen, and of course she was always so fat no one wanted to marry her.”
“I’d drink, too,” said Barbara.
“Well, yeah. But think of my bad luck in getting stuck with such a depressing partner. I mean, I thought it was going to be fun, you know.” Bobbie reached for her glass of wine and took a deep draught. The others glanced around and did the same.
“Well,” Valerie continued, “What do you think happened when I got home the first night?”
“Fatso calls,” quipped Barbara. There was laughter now no longer suppressed.
“Right. And let me tell you, I’ve never had such a depressing phone call in my life. At midnight, no less. And drunk! I mean, she wasn’t just sipping, she was blasted out of her gourd! Nearly incoherent, I couldn’t understand half of what she said. Rambling on about her job and her dead mother, and at some point I think she said, ‘You don’t need to dry out, you stupid little pigeon, you need to get soaked.’ I don’t know if those were her exact words because she was hacking and slurring so badly through the whole call. But can you imagine, my first night home from AA and I get an obscene phone call from my partner?”
Bobbie m
oved around the table filling everyone’s glass but Valerie’s, who had finished her juice. Marge, who hadn’t spoken a word in an hour, said, “What did you think you were getting into, the D.A.R.?” More laughter. Valerie looked wounded.
“That wasn’t very nice,” she said.
“So what did you do, did you go back to the meeting the next night?” Barbara asked, attempting to take Valerie’s mind off her tiny wound.
“Oh, yes, I went back, but I was a little scared this time. Of course I was hoping, you know, my partner wouldn’t be there.”
“And was she?”
“Yes, I’m afraid she was. She acted as if nothing had happened, just as polite as the first time I had met her, you know. ‘My name’s so-and-so and I’m an alcoholic.’ Just the same.”
“Did she apologize?”
“No, she never mentioned the call. The meeting went well, everybody cheerful and positive, telling their stories and thanking god and promising to be there for their partners if tempted to take a drink.”
Barbara and Bobbie and Marge were losing interest in Valerie’s self-absorption and just wanted to have a few laughs before it was time to go home. Valerie had succeeded as she often had in the past in thrusting herself and her problems to the forefront of an evening that was intended for fun, gossip and laughs. In truth, this would probably be the last time she was invited to join them for their special women’s night at one of their homes. They just wouldn’t tell her the next time they decided to get together.
“You can’t believe what happened when I got home that night,” she started up again.
“Oh, yes we can,” said Bobbie, rather rudely.
“You can?”
“Sure. Fatty called again, drunk as a pig, and insulted the hell out of you. Right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. But don’t you think that’s incredible? I mean, I went there for help and what did I get but a drunk, obscene phone caller. That isn’t fair, is it? What do you think I should have done? Shouldn’t I have reported her to somebody, the police or somebody?”
