Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  After five beers and the insertion of my earplugs, with Meg’s arm across my chest, I at last eased into a welcome unconscious sleep, which was interrupted throughout the night by fire trucks and raving bums in the street below. I woke well before dawn and just lay there soaked in sweat, trying to get a grasp on where I was, what room I was in, who I was lying next to. I woke with all the dreadful feelings of a condemned man who was about to be executed at dawn.

  I tried to count my blessings. I tried to tell myself that everything was all right. After all, I had Meg; I could see; I could walk; I could still enjoy beer. But was it enough? It was nowhere near enough. I didn’t want merely to be a survivor. Merely to survive was a disgrace in America. We were doomed the day our forefathers had written “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yes, “pursuit of happiness,” I thought. Exactly. I saw Americans as a pack of mad greyhounds, all with their tongues hanging out, speeding after some stuffed rabbit.

  Meg tried to get me to gear down and focus. “First things first,” she told me. “We must slowly and carefully rebuild our lives here and not overly complicate them with frantic fantasy.”

  I was afraid now to make any action out of fear of the multiplicity of crazy reactions it might cause, so I tried to follow Meg’s plan. First we would take a bus out to her parents’ house in New Jersey, where our van had been parked. Then we’d get the van back on the road and go to Rhode Island to visit my father and stepmother for the Fourth of July. That way we’d escape the madness. I didn’t want to see any celebration. I didn’t want to see fireworks or tall ships.

  Everything was too overwhelming. The world was too filled with objects and people, and some of the people had to go, had to be condemned to death so that the productive ones could go on living and make the earth into the good and wonderful paradise it was meant to be in the first place, and should certainly have been by this bicentennial summer. And worst of all, I knew that I was one of those who should go. I should step aside for people like Meg, the protective rug merchants of the world, the blessed people with a plan and a will.

  Meg’s mother could see that I was very upset and overly thin. At the same time she was not given to indulgence. She came from one of those places where a nervous breakdown was viewed as weak and self-indulgent behavior. So on the whole she left me alone, and I spent my visit there draining endless cans of Budweiser, watching our great nation on TV prepare for its bicentennial summer: smiling faces eating pies and cakes all across America.

  Meg cheered when the van started right up, and we were off for yet another joyless visit to another version of home in Rhode Island. Meg drove, and I sat there like the zombie I’d become, wondering how we would ever get through this season in hell together. By the time we got on the Connecticut Thruway, I was reading to Meg out loud from my well-underlined copy of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death—perhaps the wrong book, but I kept feeling there was comfort in it somewhere, although I couldn’t grasp it. I think I was trying to identify, embrace, at least understand what this dark force was in me, this huge drive to return to nothing. I’d read a passage to myself and have the fantasy that I understood it, and then I’d get all excited and read it out loud to Meg. But I could see Meg didn’t understand it, and when she didn’t understand it, it fell apart in my mind like gobbledygook, and nothing held together. I wanted that damn book to save me by helping me forgive myself for being so neurotic. I was hoping it would allow me to see myself as a fatality of civilization.

  I thought that being with my father and my stepmother, Babs, would be a good way to escape the bicentennial madness. It would definitely be fuzzy and subdued, and I thought, Well, we’ll just take it easy and get drunk by the swimming pool, treat it like a vacation. And maybe if they’re interested, we’ll show them a few of our slides of India Meg had just gotten developed.

  I had lingering fantasies of Mom being alive, standing at the gate of the driveway, weeping with joy as her prodigal son came down the road, home from the sea at last, with his round-the-world stories and his duffel bag of dirty laundry thrown over his back. I was able, with Meg’s help, to realize that was a far-gone fantasy, but I still expected Babs and Dad to be just a little bit excited about our trip to India.

  We drove to Rhode Island on July third. The road up, at least as far as New Haven, was like some insane, end-of-the-world National Lampoon takeoff on the Fourth of July, only I wasn’t laughing. I was looking for, if not the answer, at least for some way to forgive it all. I thought if I could figure out what Norman O. Brown was talking about before we got to Rhode Island, I’d be saved. I wanted him to tell me it was not my fault, and not Mom’s fault, and if I had to find fault to save myself, it was in the capitalistic culture I’d been born into. I wanted him to tell me that my pain was real, that I was one of civilization’s discontents, and now I had to learn to be courageous and live with it, and not leak out so much on everyone. I couldn’t help noticing how I had marked up all the pages of the book just like Mom used to do while reading her weekly Christian Science lesson from Science and Health.

  I felt so alone and out of it, so unpatriotic, as giant breadbox-shaped station wagons filled with large American families passed and wove in front of us, cutting us off as they dragged hideous speedboats and trailers behind them. There’d be a flash of three or four children smiling idiotic sugar smiles out the back window of a station wagon as a giant semi truck moved up behind them, like a great mechanized whale about to devour them whole. After New Haven, the traffic thinned out some, but it still seemed like one big race to pleasure, everyone heading up the coast to get to the sea before that great bicentennial Fourth of July popped in their faces. And as we rode I had a dreadful sense of how that giant megalopolis was spreading like a great colorless cancer up the East Coast, and every time I heard that phrase “Northeast Corridor,” I thought of cancer: Washington spreading into Baltimore, Baltimore bleeding into Wilmington, which crept into Philly, which overflowed into Trenton, then Newark, and New York, then on to Bridgeport and New Haven. It was one long, endless sprawl of tacky houses, factories, shopping malls, and multiplex cinemas. The desperate thought of it grinding in my mind made me search all the harder for the answer, the explanation, as I paged through that damned Life Against Death with shaking hands. Then, just before Connecticut turned into Rhode Island, there was a brief, beautiful stretch of highway where we could see some rolling hills and one or two working farms in the distance, and this, at last, led into the less populated region of Rhode Island where Dad and Babs lived, our weird sanctuary from that 1976 Fourth of July.

  Dad and Babs had chosen that ranch house as a kind of pleasure dome where they could start a new life just down the road from their painful origins. They had bonded out of mutual pain and disaster. Shortly after Mom killed herself, Babs’s husband drank himself to death. He’d started drinking in a big way the day the youngest of their three sons was killed in a marine training accident at Camp Pendleton, and he didn’t: stop until it killed him. Dad also started drinking in a big way after Mom died and Topher, Cole, and I fled what was left of the nest, and one night he woke up in a puddle of blood. He had made it as far as the telephone and was able to call the emergency unit, the same one that came so fast for Mom just a few months before, but he passed out before they arrived. Something inside Dad gave way, and there was blood everywhere, but they got him to the hospital before his entire life leaked out. I didn’t go home to visit that time. I only called in each day to see how he was doing. Coleman didn’t go home, either. Topher had moved to Providence and I’m not sure how often he checked in on Dad, if at all. But when Babs, who lived down the road, found out about Dad’s condition, she began to visit him every day and some new bond was made.

  Babs and Dad married less than a year after both their mates did themselves in. I didn’t blame them for that. It must have been hell to live alone swamped in those painful memories. Babs’s family was less tolerant of her new marriage, and her older son was acti
ng like Hamlet when he complains about his mother getting married before the funeral meats were cold. He’d have nothing to do with Dad or Babs after the wedding. Her younger son was more demonstrative. He had just returned from Vietnam addicted to heroin and ended up burning down Babs’s old farmhouse, with most of her antiques in it, when he was stoned and crashing there with a bunch of his Nam buddies. They got out before the fire got them, but the farmhouse was a total loss. By then, Dad and Babs had moved into their new home just down the road from the dark spot where Mom had died in the driveway. Such a history of pain. I went over it again to myself and out loud to Meg, who stared ahead into that holiday rush like a freaked-out fighter pilot trying to land her plane.

  As we pulled in on that black asphalt driveway, we saw the whole yard as an immaculate stage setting that gave our eyes some rest, after the hectic highway. It was blessed order, perhaps the result of a fascist mind, but certainly the best part of it: the fresh-cut lawn, as well-kept as a golf course; the flagpole with the American flag fluttering slightly in a gentle southeasterly wind up from Narragansett Bay, which lay in the distance far below.

  Dad and Babs must have been on the lookout for us (most likely their entire morning’s activity), because as soon as Meg parked our van, they came out of the front door onto the flagstone terrace to greet us. Dad cried “Hi-ho, hi-ho!” in some strange parody of a party voice, like an actor who was standing close to you on stage but making his voice sound as if it was coming from far away.

  “Hi, kids,” Babs said, and Meg and I both delivered the obligatory pecks on Babs’s weathered, leathery face with its rosy glow of ruptured capillaries. Then there was the obligatory bundle-of-wire hug with Dad, followed by his old quick pat on my back, his almost pleading signal for release from too much intimacy. We all backed away from each other. Meg and I had arrived.

  As soon as I stepped into that house the panic began. I kept having flashes of India, Amsterdam, and fantasies of Bali. I kept thinking I could be in Bali now rather than here, and every time I thought that I’d realize I wasn’t in either place. I wasn’t in Rhode Island and I wasn’t in Bali. I was stuck like some tortured ghost in a self-created limbo between a place I had seen too much of and a place I had never seen.

  When I saw Dad’s bright blue swimming pool out the living room window, it occurred to me that was exactly where I wanted to be. That was the reason I’d come home in the first place. I’d come home so I could swim in Dad’s pool. I sensed the only thing that could bring me back into this world was to immerse myself in it, and I rushed to change into my Speedo swimsuit while Meg brought our bags into the guest room.

  Babs went into the kitchen to start dinner and Dad followed me around the house asking me what I was doing, as I did the obvious, and then commented on it for him. “Now I’m changing into my swimsuit, Dad. Now I’m going for a swim in your pool, Dad. Don’t worry about me, Dad, I won’t drown.”

  Stepping into their backyard was like walking into a Kodachrome Hollywood postcard, a synthetic reality. The very unreality of it allowed me to be there, as I stepped out, a little chilled in my new slim, fatless body, the string of my Speedo Ocean Brief pulled tight to take up the slack.

  Above the pool was a powder-blue sky with streaks of pink from the descending sun, and the sliver of a new moon could just be seen. Below this expanse of blue, framed by the high wooden fence that surrounded the back patio, was the other blue of the magnificent protected pool and its deck of dark green Astroturf. I could feel the turf’s cool oily resilience under my bare feet as I moved toward that perfectly heated water and plunged. That dive and its mad splash, the facedown beating strokes that carried me from one end of the pool to the other, made me feel like I had arrived at last.

  But that feeling was almost instantly broken by Dad’s following me around the edge of the pool with his ongoing, chattering commentary about how he had measured the temperature at a steady seventy-six degrees all day, and didn’t I want to have a look at his new automatic robot pool cleaner. It was also broken by Babs calling from the kitchen window, “My goodness, Brewster, we’re going to have to put some fat on that body of yours! It looks like India has turned you two kids into skeletons.” I was too excited by the fact that Babs had acknowledged our trip to India to care that she had broken my picture of perfection.

  I was still swimming when my body sensed, as if participating in a kind of intuition of fluids and liquids, the encroaching cocktail hour. The cast of melancholy light breaking over the tops of distant elms and maples sent terns, sparrows, and swallows flying home to their night nests and left the sad, empty, lonely chirping of robins on distant lawns. All of this made the entire swimming pool feel like a giant dry martini, and gave me the sign that it was at last cocktail hour. I pulled myself out, wrapped up in one of Babs’s big, fluffy, brightly colored bath towels, and went in to change.

  As Meg and I passed through that dustless, posh, wall-to-wall-carpeted living room, we saw Babs nervously thumbing through House and Garden, waiting for Dad, who paced by one of the antique grandfather clocks, to give the official bartender’s “okay.” The clock said five of five and I could feel that familiar, tense anticipation grow in the room as the hands of the clock slowly moved round and struck: one, two, three, four, five; and all the tension of the day gave way as Dad said, at last, in that formal bartender’s voice, “May I fix you a drink, Mrs. North?”

  Babs put down her magazine as if she were surprised by this offer. She just sat there for a moment pretending to consider it, as if she might at any moment say no and order cranberry juice instead. And then in the most casual tone that she could deliver—and she delivered it as convincingly as any good actress might—Babs said, “Well, I don’t mind if I do, Mr. North. Do you think you could fix me a dry vodka martini with three onions?”

  And Mr. North answered, “Well, I don’t know why not,” and they were off for their glorious cocktail ritual, Babs going into the TV room to turn on the local news while Dad headed for the bar to begin his measuring and pouring. Soon the tinkle of ice against glass blended with the local news and the Muzak that played in every room under it all.

  Before Mom died, and in the early years while we were growing up, there was no formal cocktail hour in our home, perhaps because Mom didn’t drink, and Dad drank very little in those days. He kept his bottles out of sight. When he opened the liquor cabinet in the dining room, he always took out a bottle of bourbon and measured it carefully. He used to make two tall bourbon-and-waters, which he drank sequentially—just enough to relax.

  But now that Dad had a wife who was also a drinking partner, the bottles were proudly on display, sitting there on a fully equipped bar with lots of cocktail accessories. It looked like a little altar.

  Although Babs had a vision of herself as a gourmet cook, it was not so easy for her to drink and cook a gourmet meal at the same time. We were usually doomed to raw meat and oversteamed vegetables. For some reason it never went the other way; we never ended up with raw vegetables and overcooked meat. I guess that had to do with Dad’s needs. Only Dad knew how to cook a steak while completely high on bourbon, and Dad wasn’t cooking that night. He was waiting for the Fourth to do his big barbecue.

  That night Babs served us frozen frogs’ legs. They came out on a plate looking like the hairless amputated legs of Lilliputian Olympic runners. Meg and I both rolled our eyes and looked across at each other. It was funny how Babs’s cooking was bringing Meg and me closer; and as we looked at each other, Babs slipped those hairless little legs, garnished with parsley, onto our TV tables somewhere in the middle of a national news report about the tall ships.

  Meg could hardly touch them, but I was drunk enough to eat them whole and ask for seconds. After dinner and dessert, somewhere in the middle of “The Odd Couple,” Babs, with the help of Meg, cleared all the dishes away and put them in the dishwasher, starting the last annoying mechanical grind before Dad’s white-noise box took over to drown out the sound of night cr
ickets.

  Still without a word of inquiry about India, Dad and Babs began to get ready for bed. Babs disappeared into their bedroom and Dad performed his last evening rituals: checking the home weather unit for wind velocity and barometric pressure; instructing me as to what lamps not to touch or turn off because they were on automatic timers. Then he retired to Babs and his white-noise box.

  Meg went to our guest room to read and I went for a welcome walk alone. I wandered in the warm night down the long country lane that led, if you followed it all the way, past the place of Mom’s death and on to the charred remains of Babs’s family farmhouse. Protected from fear and anxiety by the warm glow of alcohol, I wandered and staggered under the stars. Nothing could touch me now, and for a minute I even considered walking all the way to our old house at the end of Shady Lane to meditate on Mom, to try to see that night in July I had missed when I was in Mexico with Meg. But it was too far to walk and too painful to dwell on, so I decided instead to try to sneak into Dad’s pool for a naked swim. I had a feeling I could pull it off if I was real quiet and didn’t splash.

  Taking my clothes off brought back the most delicious body memories from childhood, of running naked on summer nights under a full moon, running nude through the white statuary in the yard of the mansion across the street from my honeysuckle boyhood home. And I suddenly wanted to have myself and I rubbed my hands all over my warm naked body trying to surprise it with some foreign touch, some unexpected move.

  I slipped into that heated pool and without a sound I swam on my back, looking up at the stars. At the same time I ran my hands down over my new body, my ass and thin thighs, as they opened and spread and pumped like some fully alive animation of those frog legs.