All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  “No, no,” Raymond Jr. was saying, “I do it to cleanse my body.”

  Josephine rolled her eyes. “That’s crazy,” she said. “You people out west have some crazy ideas.”

  Raymond Jr. lived on an island off the coast of Seattle. Ever since he’d left at age fourteen to go to boarding school, he had lived away from home. He had a long beard and piercing blue eyes, giving him a look that was part Paul Newman and part Rasputin. Raymond Jr. rarely came east, most probably to avoid being called Raymond Jr. In the Pacific Northwest, he was studying to be a psychologist with a concentration in family dynamics. He had been hoping for a chance over the wedding weekend to use his own family as guinea pigs. In his backpack upstairs he had brought some cassettes of whale music. He’d read in one of his courses in graduate school that the high frequency of the song of the humpback whale, a sound widely believed to be both complex and beautiful, was known to put people at ease.

  The gravel driveway led gently down the hill from the big house and curved slightly to the right to get to the guest cottage, past honeysuckle bushes that grew wild alongside the manicured hedges.

  Everyone had trimmed hedges on Lily Pond Lane; it seemed very little was permitted to grow wild for long. Not even the children. Every year at summer’s end, before the start of school, all the boys were marched to the barbershop on Newtown Lane and their long sun-bleached curls sheared off to a bowl or buzz cut. The long ponytails we girls wore all summer were loosened from colorful hair fasteners, detangled, and trimmed to shoulder length.

  There was a studied sameness to the landscape. Pastel hydrangeas were planted in lines, their stately blossoms waving in the wind off the sea. Mums and marigolds bordered driveways in a trim line under the hedge.

  As children, we sought out the wild. The tangles of honeysuckle grew untended and unarranged. We plucked the flowers and sucked the slight drop of sweetness at the stem. We picked the small raspberries that grew in thorny thickets along the bike path to town and the stray potatoes that lay scattered in rows of dust after the farmers had driven their gleaning trucks through the fields at summer’s end.

  In the mornings, the high two-toned trill of the morning bobwhites announced the day. We rode in bicycle herds of children down the shaded lanes, past the dull thwacks of tennis balls on courts hidden behind topiary, past delivery vans from Dreesen’s market turning into long narrow drives. We rode all the way down to the end of Lily Pond Lane, just past Georgica Beach, where to the left it turned onto West End Road. There on the corner was the house of the infamous Cat Lady, as she was called and feared by an entire generation of children. The Cat Lady’s house was a brown shingle saltbox, much like others in the neighborhood, but whereas the others had neat lines of hedges, and gravel driveways raked flat and trimmed in white stones, the vegetation at the Cat Lady’s house had grown untended and heavy over the eaves of the house, bowing her roofline. The tree branches were gnarled, the grass rough brown scrub; only the rose hip bushes seemed to show any signs of life, the small red fruit spotted along the bramble. Despite being forbidden to do so, we would all gather there, daring each other to go up and knock on her door. We saw cobwebs in the windows, or so we imagined. Sometimes, we saw stray cats in the brush, a mother cat with kittens or large toms. Wary and quiet, the cats hid in the shadows or darted rapidly across the lawn. “Shhhhhh!” we’d all admonish, because whenever the cats ran, one or more of the smaller children inevitably called out or gasped. One boy named Dennis Montgomery claimed the strange mother and daughter who lived in the dilapidated house had seen him hiding in the bushes one day and asked him in for tea. “They have eight million cats,” he told us, his eyes wide. “And garbage everywhere. I mean, everywhere.” No one believed that.

  The Montgomerys lived across the street from the Cat Lady’s house, and Barbara Montgomery was a friend of my mother’s. “Mrs. Montgomery says that Dennis has an overactive imagination,” our mother would tell us. “I told Mrs. Montgomery, ‘Barbara, my three girls are very impressionable,’ because you are, you three girls. You believe anything you hear, especially if it’s a boy who tells you. So I told that Barbara Montgomery, ‘Barbara, your boy is telling my three girls some fibs and I don’t care for it at all.’ You’re not to go there, and it should be none of your concern what Dennis has to say. Just stay away, as the adults tell you, and whatever Dennis makes up won’t alarm you so much.” But our alarm was the point. We would wait behind the bramble, holding our bikes at the ready for a getaway, until one or another kid would say, “Look, a curtain moved,” or “There goes a cat,” and we’d jump on the bikes and squeal them along the curve at the start of Lily Pond Lane, racing each other past the public beach parking lot, past the small lily pond and the potato field, pedaling fast until we were breathless and back at the road of manicured hedges where Lily Pond Lane stretched out parallel to the ocean and life yawned familiar, predictable, and dull.

  Years later, the Cat Lady’s house became the cultural phenomenon known as Grey Gardens, and the mother and daughter who resided there, the Beales, gained national attention. It ended up Dennis Montgomery had not been lying through his buckteeth about what he’d seen that summer day long ago, when the Beale ladies, Big and Little Edie, as they became known, invited their curious little neighbor in for tea.

  Since their arrival, the Jackson family had been playing tennis to pass the time, and wandering the wallpapered rooms of the guest cottage, figuring out what to do next.

  Helen hadn’t slept well after the rehearsal dinner. The bedrooms in the cottage had wallpaper that covered not just the walls but also the ceiling. The black orchids on the wallpaper in the room she and Raymond were staying in, wallpaper that extended up across the ceiling, looked like fiendish spiders to her by three in the morning. She went down to the kitchenette to make some tea. There she ran into her son Raymond Jr., who was sitting at the small table drinking a beer. She told him about the orchids turning into spiders.

  He laughed. “Imagine if you were tripping, Mom,” he said. “Those spiders would swoop down and freak the shit out of you.”

  Helen could not have been more discombobulated by this thought.

  Yet by morning she had already moved past her sleepless night, and was overseeing her family playing tennis. For almost thirty years she had been making sure her kids played nicely together, played fair, and she wasn’t going to stop simply because they were suddenly adults. “Wait a minute, let’s just review the rules here, folks,” she was saying. “Dean and Jim are going to cream you two sacks,” she said to Raymond and Chris.

  “Thank you, Mom, thanks for the encouragement,” Chris said.

  “You should change sides. Dean-o, play with your father. Even it up.”

  Whenever Helen wanted to slow the action, she demanded the family stop and review the rules. Over the years most everything got reviewed, rules for games, rules for dinner, rules for life.

  “Nice try,” Dean said. He lobbed the ball back over the net to his father, who was serving. Raymond Sr.’s baggy shorts and high-top sneakers gave him the air of a prematurely gray toddler. He bounced the ball, then arched his body back, threw the ball above his head, and hit it across the net.

  “That’s an ace,” said Chris. “The old man’s still got some steel left in him.”

  “I ain’t dead yet, kids,” Raymond said.

  “Raymond Jackson,” said Helen from her lounge chair, the knitting needles flying, “we’re dealing with a family in crisis up that hill. You don’t make jokes like that today, honey. Not here. Not now.”

  Their night, the rehearsal dinner the night before, had been a disappointment for Helen. An unseasonable wind had whipped up on Friday afternoon, making the planned clambake on the beach impossible. The meal was brought in preprepared, from the Seafood Shop on the Montauk Highway, in trays covered in aluminum foil. Three of the round tables under the tent were pressed into use and set for the group of thirty, and the plastic sides of the party tent unfurled so they enc
ased the group, sealed in tight against the elements. The wind off the sea side of the house occasionally buffeted the plastic tarp.

  My siblings and I were late returning from the hospital. Dean, his family, and the close friends invited for the evening were already under the tent with my mother and my aunt Jeanne, along with the three blonde wives of my half brothers and the Florida cousins. Everyone wore heavy sweaters and disposable plastic lobster bibs. My mother glared at us as we walked into the tent, fresh from the ICU, and took me aside before I could join the group. “It’s about damn time,” she said. “What were you kids thinking, leaving me here with these people? You had all afternoon with your father while Sissy and I have had to hold down the fort and entertain. Is it my wedding?”

  “Actually, you told me last week it was.”

  “No guff. You know what I mean. Is all of this”—she flitted her hand toward the table across the tent, where Dean’s family sat—“my responsibility? No. It’s yours.”

  Across the tent, Dean and his family sat with a few of my cousins, all in sweaters and bibs. I felt if I could just get there, get over to that side of the tent, I would be safe. I could cut a line straight through her anger to the other side.

  When she saw me walking across to her, Helen’s mouth opened in a wide smile. “Oh, goodie,” she said to everyone, “here she comes, folks, here comes our bride!” She put her arm around me. “Someone get the bride a bib and a drink,” she said to the table. “We want our city girl to feel special tonight.” Helen could put the world back in some kind of predictable order, I thought. I could join this family of homemade sweaters and pie recipes and special clambakes by the sea.

  Watching my father in the hospital that afternoon, we were unable to leave. His hair was dry, matted down, his mouth slack, his shoulders heaving, his head hanging off to one side at an awkward angle. There was a slow stench of stale, which I imagine I knew even then was death slipping into the antiseptic room and tinging the air. Once the sight of him became something we had gotten used to, the smell reigned in that quiet room. At some point much later it occurred to me I should have looked for the yellow legal pad back in his room. He had said he was working on the toast for the rehearsal dinner the last time I’d spoken to him, and knowing him, it would be there somewhere among the books and index cards and vials of prescription pills. But we lingered, transfixed and awkward in the hospital room, and there was no time to rummage up in his room, if I had even had the heart.

  Under the tent that night my siblings and I gamely tied the plastic Seafood Shop bibs around our necks, and in some fashion the hospital visit receded temporarily even as it still glazed the air, a glow just past that of the votive candles illuminating the tent’s festivities. Like my father himself, the memory of him in his hospital bed was present that night but not, palpable yet visible only to those with the eyes to see. Soon the lobsters were passed and the bright shells cracked, the wine was poured, and the toasts started. Laughter began. Under the tent the evening warmed. Occasionally the wind off the beach buffeted the flaps of the tent, blowing an eerie chill through the flushed crowd.

  I woke up the morning of my wedding and I realized I had lost my voice. It was a sparkling clear day out as I stood at the window and watched the beach for a while.

  The waves were gentle. My nephews were already up and paddling their surfboards out past the first break. I watched my mother walk down to the beach and stand at the water’s edge, tucking her hair under her bathing cap. Downstairs in the kitchen, I heard the screen door open and bang shut a few times as it always did on busy mornings. A teakettle whistled. “Get out of my kitchen!” I heard Johanna say. And I heard Laura, the housekeeper, reprimand her, “Hey, woman, be nice to him, he’s just a boy!” We all had a long day ahead.

  “You sound fine to me,” said Nat Thorpe, the new minister at the Episcopal church in town. He had a beard and thick sandy hair that fell in a hank over his forehead. He constantly pushed it back as he spoke.

  I went to visit him in the late morning, to tell him I had lost my voice.

  “I mean,” I said, “I can’t hear myself. I can’t hear myself think. I need to talk this out.”

  He smiled. “Okay,” he said.

  “I don’t even know you. But here I am.”

  “Let’s see what we can do,” he said. “About your voice. Getting it back. First, how’s everyone at home?” He nodded. “This is a big day.”

  I sat in the blondewood-paneled office, the beveled Tiffany glass windows looking out across a small field to the town windmill.

  Though I didn’t know Nat—we weren’t a religious family—he had agreed to conduct the wedding ceremony.

  “Tell me about your father,” he said. “I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting the man.” Nat used the word “yet” and I focused on that. Nat thought he was going to come out of this, maybe. Or maybe he was just saying that for my benefit. “What did he teach you?” Nat asked.

  What did my father teach me? “He taught me, don’t expect too much.”

  We had been in the sunroom when my father first told me this. I was just twenty, too old for some things, too young for others. Same as any age.

  He had handed me the most recent installment of Franklin the octopus that day. I pleaded for the stories long past the age when I would by any count want to hear a children’s story, but I kept at it to coax his imagination out, as if Franklin could somehow keep him going, even as I saw him recede. His handwriting, on the envelope, was shaky, the letters already like skeletons. “I finally managed this last installment,” he had written on the envelope. “With love and pride, Daddy.”

  “Don’t expect too much,” he said as I took the envelope, “because you’ll just be disappointed.” And he bowed his head.

  It was then, that moment, that I saw his life was not about expectation anymore; it was about disappointment. Yet Franklin defied that. In the stories, even the last one, his voice was clear. The charming, charismatic voice that was my father’s. Deep inside a well, covered up by alcohol, somewhere in there, his imagination still existed whole, and I saw it struggling to come out. That was the point of Franklin, anyway, of asking him to write the stories. To focus his mind, to coax out a few more marvels. I knew that when I asked him to write the stories. Franklin was how I’d keep him close, long after he was no longer there.

  “My father taught me not to expect much,” I told Nat, the minister. “And I don’t.”

  “That’s good,” the minister said. “That’s good advice. Your father sounds like a very wise man.”

  “He’s in a coma,” I reminded the minister. “He’s in a coma, and yesterday my brother made us buy chicken.”

  “Chicken?”

  “In case we got hungry. As if we were going to be passing around greasy legs and thighs while my father lay attached to a machine, struggling to breathe.”

  Watching a person in a coma, I realized then, plays tricks. No matter the machines, the cords and nozzles, a person in a coma looks like he is sleeping. It is impossible not to stare and try to will him awake.

  Maybe that’s what Scott was thinking. Let’s just make a picnic of it, and maybe he’ll wake up and join in. Of course he knew better, but everyone grasps for their own way to deflect the weight of such a situation.

  “And you’re getting married today.” It wasn’t a question but a statement.

  “Apparently. Yeah. I’m supposed to be getting married today,” I told the minister. “It’s like this wave is coming, and I can’t stop it.”

  Nat waited. He folded his hands in his lap and assumed a psychiatric silence. Finally he said, “Are you here to ask my permission or my advice?”

  I laughed. “Give me whatever you’ve got. I’m here because I got nothing.”

  “You’re laughing,” he said. “You’re laughing, but I know you don’t think this is funny.”

  “I’m supposed to get married today,” I repeated. “Everyone is here, the in-laws, the relatives, the
tent is on the lawn, and boom.”

  “Boom?”

  “Yeah, boom. It’s all happening and I can’t stop it. Boom. That’s all I got.”

  “Okay, let’s back it up. Do you want to stop it?”

  Did I want to stop it? No one had asked me that.

  “That’s why you think you’ve lost your voice. Because no one is asking to hear it. But I want to hear it. What do you want to do?”

  I sighed. “This is why I’m here. I don’t know.”

  “Why do you want to marry Dean,” he asked, “do you think?”

  I had an answer for that, though I did not know it until it came out of my mouth.

  “I am in the sea,” I said. “Just like the sea by the house, the sea I’ve looked at my whole life from my childhood bedroom. But I’m in the sea, not looking from the house. A tidal wave is coming, it will pull me under, and I will drown. Dean comes by in a motorboat. He throws me a rope and starts the engine, and up I go. Far, far offshore, away from the long gray house, away from the tidal wave, skimming along the top of the water, racing away.”

  We live on such a perilous dune.

  Nat sat listening, his hands still clasped in his lap.

  “Okay,” he said after a while. “I’m going to say something that’s obvious, though I suspect right now it may not seem that way to you. Listen, whether or not you marry Dean today, or ever, is not going to change your father’s prognosis. He’s on his own path now. It’s my opinion that you should stay on yours.”

  “I should water-ski, in other words.”

  He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Water-ski. I like that. Water-ski.” Then he laughed. “Not boom, but zoom!” He loved his own joke. “Zoom!” he repeated a few more times. “I’ve got to remember that.”

  As I was leaving, he called after me. “Hey,” he said, “you know, it’s possible to get out into deep water and not drown.”

  At precisely 4 p.m. that afternoon, my mother fit the wedding veil on my head. I was looking in the mirror in her bathroom as she did this. All I could see behind me were her hands pulling on my hair, poking pins in my head. Her earrings, big gold hoops, dangled in and out of sight as she moved around behind me.