“Okay, so minus the camping out of the equation. What do you think of the idea?”
The look in her eyes was suddenly the look of a thirty-year-old. It is a law of the universe that your words come back to you—and in exactly the same tone of voice. “Dad,” she said, “be sensible.”
I AM AN UPBEAT sort of person, in general. It’s a valuable temperament in the book publishing world, where there are eighteen failures for every success and where the tidal sweeps of fashion knock even the most sure-footed soul into the hard surf at least once or twice a year. It’s a valuable temperament in the rough waters of raising teenagers, too. And so, though I’d gotten exactly nowhere with Natasha, I stepped down the hall and knocked on Anthony’s door, thinking that, if I could convince him to come out in favor of the family road trip, then he and Jeannie and I could gradually work Tasha free of her resistance.
That spring, Anthony was going through the ordeal known as puberty. His nose and ears were growing too fast for the rest of his face. His skin was breaking out. Dark hairs were showing themselves above his top lip. His sister, of course, never tired of reminding him of these troubles, and Jeannie and I were often having to act as referee. When I went into his room, I found him lying on his bed tossing a baseball into the air and catching it, over and over again, in a sullen hypnosis.
“I remember doing that,” I said, sitting sideways on the bed and squeezing his lower leg once. Anthony was at the age where he did not particularly like to be touched. “Some nights I’d try to get to a thousand catches.”
“On those boring North Dakota nights, huh, Dad?” He stopped tossing the ball and looked at me.
“They could be pretty bad. But it’s a cool place in other ways. You’ve never seen the real countryside there. Wild buffalo. The Badlands. Native American stuff.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like a different world,” I went on, encouraged. “Gram and Gramps liked it there.” I saw a familiar shadow come over his pimpled face; he and my father had been close. “Still sad about them, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I have to go out there, you know, to settle the estate, sell the house.”
“When?”
“August. I should drive, and August is the only time I can get away from work for that long. Want to go?”
“Where?”
“North Dakota?”
“Driving?”
“Sure. I thought we’d make a family adventure out of it. All of us.”
“Nah.”
“What about just me and you, then?”
“Nah. I was thinking of going out for football. I was gonna ask if I could stay at Jonah’s house when you guys go to the Cape.”
You’re 135 pounds, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I had been a 135-pound football player myself, seen a total of about fourteen minutes playing time, and had a lot of good memories from those days, and one shaky knee.
“What if we made the trip before football?”
“It starts August 3, Dad.”
“All right. But in principle you’d like to go, right?”
“Not that much, to tell you the truth. I’m into, like, my own private space these days. You know, all that time in the car together, motel rooms. Not my thing.”
THERE IS A PATIO at the back of our house. It’s the usual setup—outdoor furniture, potted plants. Standing or sitting there you can look down toward a stream that cuts its weak flow into a brush-filled ravine. It’s all we have in the way of wildness, and some evenings, sitting in a patio chair facing those trees as darkness fell, I’d feel a fleeting sense of some other way of life, less domesticated, less safe. Not free of family obligations, exactly—I loved being part of a family—but with fewer of the responsibilities of modern American middle-class suburban life. Fewer of the particular concerns and duties that are payment for the safest, richest, easiest lifestyle in human history.
That night, after the visits with Natasha and Anthony, I went out and stood on the patio and stared off into the trees. Our faithful dog, Jasper, came and leaned against my leg, a silent pal. Though Jasper was more affectionate these days than either of our two kids, I knew they loved me. I knew they’d swing out away from Jeannie and me over the next years, then come circling back. When they were in their twenties and thirties, we’d all be close. . . . But by then they’d have their own lists of concerns and duties, their own oil changes, doctors’ appointments, and business meetings, maybe their own kids. Very possibly their careers would pull them a thousand or two thousand miles away, leaving Jeannie and me to grow old the way my parents had, buoyed by a phone call once or twice a week, flowers on Mother’s Day, hectic visits. Why were we all so proud of a style of living that splintered the family like so much dried-out firewood?
I heard the screen door close and recognized the scrape and tap of Jeannie’s shoes on stone. She came up beside me in the dark. Jasper moved over and leaned against her knee.
“No go on Dakota?” she said.
“No go. I’ve been out here pondering the meaning of life.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Not so bad. They’re good kids. Just drifting out into their own orbits already. It’s natural, it’s right. Though I guess I have this image . . . I don’t know. . . .”
“Of some perfect, endless family life?” she said. “All happiness and McDonald’s commercials?”
“No McDonald’s, but, yeah, I guess so. Something that doesn’t just dissolve in a burst of cell phones and grumpiness, then whoosh away into biannual visits.”
“You’re an idealist by nature, my love. I just go along, taking what comes.”
“What comes is pretty good.”
“More than pretty good,” she said, and then, “I’ve always thought work solved the idealist part for you. I mean, a beautiful photograph of a glistening lamb chop with purple new potatoes and asparagus. There’s some imagined eternal perfection represented there, something lasting. Your books are . . . unmottled. Is that a word?”
“It’s the eternal part I’m thinking about, I guess.”
“Nothing we can do about that, honey.”
“I know, sure. But does that mean we have to just go along with everything, live like everybody else lives, by the same assumptions? Is that the best we can do?”
“It’s your parents’ dying. You lost them, and now you’re worried about losing the children, which won’t happen.”
“I just don’t want to look back with regret, that’s all. If there’s any chance to look back.”
“What do you have in mind? Go and live on a Greek isle?”
“I don’t know. At least the family would stay together longer if we lived on a Greek isle. Do things as a unit instead of flying off into iPods and e-mails and jobs on the other edge of the continent.”
“You took a job 1,800 miles away from your parents.”
“I know it. And I love our life, I do. I just . . . question it sometimes lately, on some level. I can’t describe it. I’ve been feeling this way for a while now, even before my parents died. Midlife, maybe. I don’t know.”
For a few minutes we were quiet. Jasper trotted away on the scent of a porcupine or squirrel, or because he didn’t like the conversation, didn’t like hearing about death and abandonment, couldn’t imagine a life without Tasha or Anthony there to scratch him behind the ears as they lay on the couch in the TV room. Aside from the occasional skunk, there was no danger lurking for him in the darkness, nothing to fear. He hadn’t known his parents, or siblings, didn’t have children, probably didn’t worry about what would happen to his loved ones and to his soul after he died. Off in the distance, beyond our little stream, we could hear traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway, a steady drone of tires and engines, even at this hour. Everyone going, I thought, always going, always hurrying, but headed where?
“You know what you need?” Jeannie asked, after a while.
“What? To drive my loony sister to North Dakota and back?”
“Yes, but before that. You need to retire early and go upstairs with your extremely affectionate wife.”
FOUR
Sometimes, after making love with Jeannie, I’d lie there beside her and feel as though the multifarious complexities that surrounded our life had been whisked away like particles of fog on a warm wind. Mind would be clear, body at peace. A fresh optimism would bloom along the windowsills of the bedroom, laying its frail, scented wreath across the sheets and pillows, and I would be clear-minded and capable, and what had to be done would be obvious, and my ability to do it beyond doubt.
That, or something like it, is what happened on the night I’ve been describing here. Before the lovemaking there was the sour taste of obligation postponed, there were the stunted conversations with the kids, two of the three people I love most on this earth, and there was the patio sadness yawning off toward a meaningless eternity.
After the lovemaking there was the calm understanding that the trip to North Dakota would be only ten days, two weeks at most, that my odd sister was a good-hearted soul. Jeannie and the children would survive perfectly well without me. Little chance I’d enjoy the trip—even postcoital calm doesn’t turn a tree root into a truffle—but it seemed at least possible that, by getting so far away from the ordinary routine, I might gain a new perspective on things.
It was a wonderful feeling, really, that sleepy, sure state. I think sometimes that our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest.
I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port? But those strategies—injecting heroin, say, or spending eighty hours a week at the office—work for a time and then stop working. Eventually the bill comes due. It occurred to me, as I faded toward sleep, that, while I wasn’t addicted to anything (well, good food, perhaps), I had devised a strategy of my own, a weaving together of favorite pleasures—food, family time, sex, work I enjoyed, tennis, vacations, TV, reading. They made a harmless enough tapestry, a pretty landscape of pleasure speckled with moments of selflessness, annoyance, worry, fear. But it was a strategy all the same, and it had started to wear thin, and then my parents’ dying had punched a hole in the worn section. That night, I had the feeling there might be something on the other side, waiting to show itself to me.
All through spring and half the summer I thought about that “something,” wondered, pondered, let the episodes of doubt wash over me and leave me slightly less steady on my feet. I knew I’d have to go to North Dakota, but all through May, June, and part of July I was somehow able to pretend to myself that it would be a quick, easy, painless errand, just a tiny glitch in the predictable pattern that was my life.
FIVE
In New York, over the course of the month of August, you go from the feeling that summer will never end, to the feeling that it has. But before it ends, the publishing world slips into a kind of hibernation: the more successful editors, agents, and authors flee Manhattan for the Hamptons, the Vineyard, the Cape, the Berkshires, Upstate. Skinny sons go out for football and come home starving, scratched up, elated. Daughters work the mall job and the babysitting job and are lulled to sleep at night by visions of their very own car. Suburban wives garden and chauffeur, shop and cook, and lie in the sun at the tennis club pool. And suburban husbands, of course, naturally, it goes without saying, pack up one of the family cars with a suitcase, maps, a couple of sport coats, and head off, where else? To the prairies of western North Dakota.
It was an uneventful leave-taking. Just after breakfast I knocked on Anthony’s door and stepped into his “own private space” to say good-bye, only to find my son all but unconscious on the bed, face down on the sheets in nothing but a pair of blue Bronxville Broncos gym shorts. Natasha was away on a lucrative four-day babysitting junket for friends of neighbors who had a house on Block Island and tow-headed boys who could shout “GIVE IT TO ME! NOW!” in three languages. And Jeannie was off making breakfast for a friend who’d had some kind of stomach surgery and could not yet cook or drive. We’d had a nice meal the night before (shiitake risotto and chocolate pudding), and said our good-byes then, so I was set for the road. Still, I procrastinated just a bit, waved at my son’s backbone and said a silent farewell, took my time going downstairs.
The refrigerator hummed. A lemony morning light fell across the tablecloth, touching a vase of homegrown flowers there and the scattered pages of the Times. So thoroughly had the domestic life enveloped me over the past, what, twenty years, that I felt, once I’d at last closed the back door behind me and was striding toward the driveway, that I was peeling away several layers of skin and setting off into America’s dusty center in my bare raw flesh.
But I went. Out the driveway. Right on Palmer, through the center of town, and then down Highway 87, past the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, along the Harlem River, and over the George Washington Bridge. I was headed toward the city of Paterson, New Jersey, where Spanakopita Cecelia lived. My sister, the odd duck.
There was the excitement of the road, there was the sadness at leaving Jeannie and the kids and Jasper behind. There were the miles of crowded expressway. And then, as I took the Main Street exit (PATERSON: MAKING EVERYONE WELCOME, the billboard said) and turned into a Latin stew of discount shops and grand old buildings and went past the Greater Faith Church of the Abundance, a creeping dread worked its way up from the soles of my running shoes. Out of embarrassment, I’ve so far refrained from saying how my sister makes her living. Here’s a hint: After working my way through downtown Paterson, I turned onto her street, and there, jutting out toward the road like a garish fingernail, was a lavender and cream sign.
CECELIA RINGLING
TAROT AND PALM READINGS
PAST-LIFE REGRESSIONS
SPIRITUAL JOURNEYINGS
Journeyings, I thought. Journeyings was perfect.
This lifestyle of hers had been a stone in my parents’ sensible work shoes from the day Cecelia moved east and had business cards printed up. Their idea of “journeyings” was to drive to Minot in August for the ox pull at the state fair. Their idea of “spiritual” was a trip to the Lutheran church in Dickinson on Sunday mornings, where they would hum along with the hymns and endure the sermon, have a buffet lunch afterward at Jack’s Café, then drive back to the farm and the real business of life. “You mean,” my father said to my sister once, when we were both visiting, “you mean to say you make a living telling people what they used to be a thousand years ago?”
I pulled in just beyond the sign and drove all the way to the end of the driveway so that the car would not be visible from the street. Foolish, of course, because the chances of anyone in Paterson recognizing my car or me were one in a hundred thousand. Still, around the office I have a certain reputation for being the no-nonsense midwestern type, and it wouldn’t do to be seen going in for a past-life regression on my first day of vacation.
Before getting out of the car I sat still and took a few slow breaths. I told myself what I had been telling myself all spring and most of the summer, ever since I’d picked up the phone and given my sister the big news that we would be driving to North Dakota together: I would be kind. I would be patient. I would rein in the side of me that wanted to mock and ridicule. I would indulge, to a fair degree, Cecelia’s odd culinary habits. I would remember that she adored my children and that my children had adored her since the days when they could not yet properly pronounce her name.
Ten days. Separate motel rooms. I would be kind.
But when I got out of the car and turned toward
the house, I saw that she was sitting on the edge of her shabby deck, barefoot, and that she was not alone. I felt myself flinch.
Cecelia and her companion were not touching, but they were sitting in what seemed to me an intimate posture. I immediately girded myself, tried to keep a pleasant, open-minded expression on my face. My sister got the good looks in our family; I got the good sense. She has beautiful, wheat-colored hair, a large, happy mouth, and eyes—brown like Pop’s—that give off a kind of shine you usually see only in the eyes of young children. There is a kind of structural perfection to her features, if that’s the right way to put it, and it has always made me think of Michelangelo working with marble, and always made other men think of ways they might convince her to take off her clothes.
For better or worse, the number of men (and perhaps a few women, who knew?) favored by that good fortune is not a small number. Which is not a problem for me—I am the farthest thing from prudish, and, in any case, not one to throw such stones. Before I met and started dating Jeannie I had my wild times, let’s leave it at that. The issue was not quantity, but quality. In high school, when she could have had a date with any boy in the sophomore, junior, or senior classes, her preference was the window-smashing, car-crashing, drug-loving son of the mayor. In college, it was a boyfriend old enough to have personal memories of the Civil War. After college, a motorcyclist with crossbones tattooed on his neck. Then, in this order: a yoga master who bilked the ashram and was chased back to Delhi in disgrace; a dreadlocked bicycle repairman/poet with pet piranhas; a septuagenarian orchestra leader participating in the first studies of male-enhancement medications and not shy about introducing that topic into dinnertime conversation at the Ringling home. It was, I often said to Jeannie, a serial menagerie of masculine misfits.
And we met them all. They came for visits and stayed a night or two, or five. They came for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July and Buddha’s birthday. Jeannie cooked for them. The kids loved them (especially Jack or Jacques, the bicycle fixer, who gave them free tune-ups on their ten-speeds, riding crazily around the block in high-speed test runs, hands clasped behind his matted curls, legs pumping furiously as he sang Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”). To each of them I was unfailingly pleasant and welcoming.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 2
