All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  Dean had put yellow pins all over East Africa, which was really exaggerating, and South Africa, which was a total lie. I had never been to the South Pacific, but there were yellow pins in Tahiti and Bora-Bora. Some days I thought, What if I just took all my little yellow pins and went home? What if? The little boy in the Masai village still played in my mind from time to time. Tied to a stake outside the family hut, a long rope around his ankle, naked and in tears. Sitting in the Jackson family living room, the wood fire crackling and the frost on the windowpanes, I wondered if that child was still alive and, if so, what he was doing. He’d be a man, with a family of his own, carrying water from the lake across the dusty village in the sun.

  “Family powwow time,” Raymond Jr. said. “I have something to say.” He spoke to Chris, “Stop messing with all those pins and sit down.”

  Helen reappeared in the doorway with her platter of cookies. By this time in the vacation, the cookies were pretty well picked over. Powdered sugar, shards of grated coconut and crumbs. A few dried rum balls and parts of my whales remained. She looked down. “Oh, dear. Pretty sad showing,” she said.

  Helen frowned, looking down at the platter. Then her face brightened. She snapped her fingers. “I know, I’ve got it!”

  “Why don’t you make a little fudge?” Dean asked.

  “I was going to offer to make some fudge,” she said. “What if I do? Fudge? Kids?”

  “Forget it, Mom,” Raymond Jr. said. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Sit, Helen,” said Chris. “Take a load off.”

  “It’ll take two seconds,” Helen said. “It’s a mix, I just add water and an egg and stir.”

  Raymond Jr. looked at his mother. “I think everyone knows what my beef is,” he said.

  “I don’t know why everyone in this family has to have a ‘beef,’” said Helen. She sat. “What? What beef, dear?”

  “I was born while Dad was in the Navy, right? Right, Mom?”

  He waited for his mother to nod. “Yes,” she said. “There I was, all alone. Expecting.”

  So excited. Just waiting.

  “No, once I was born is what I’m looking at. So here I am, the first baby. Getting all this love and attention, you know? How long, Mom? How long was it just you and me?”

  “Three months,” Helen said. “Three months almost to the day.”

  “Right. Then he comes home. Suddenly, boom. Mom has no time for me. Then they come along.” Raymond Jr. looked at his siblings. “Boom, boom, boom. Three strikes and I’m out. No one has ever had any time for me. As far as parenting is concerned, I am always the one left out in the cold.”

  “Now, Raymond, honey, that’s not how it went,” Helen said.

  “See that?” Raymond Jr.’s voice raised. “I don’t even have my own name? They three all got their own names. No, I’m just Raymond the small. Raymond the insignificant. Three months I was Raymond, and then into the shadows I crawled for time immemorial.”

  “Raymond, honey,” Helen said.

  “Yes, Mom, I remember being in my crib,” Raymond Jr. said.

  “This too is horseshit,” said Jessica. “No one remembers being in their crib.”

  “I do,” said Raymond Jr. “Highly intelligent people do, it’s proven. I could probably remember getting my diapers changed if I thought hard enough about it.” He tapped his temple.

  Jessica rolled over and sat up on the rug. “No one remembers these things, Raymond. It’s you crazy therapists who try to get people to remember things that never even happened.”

  “I remember being six,” Chris said. “That’s my earliest memory. I remember my little snowsuit.” He looked to his mother. “The red one?”

  Helen smiled. “With the blue piping. You were so cute. A little packet of dimples, you were.”

  “A tiny bundle of boy,” Jessica said from her position on the floor. “Little Kiss-Kiss. Chrissy-poo.”

  The light off the fire zigzagged across the wall where the competitive map was framed. It zipped shadows across Asia and sparkled on Australia. The Northern Hemisphere burned with the kind of glow reserved for ghost stories around bonfires.

  “Let me put this another way,” Raymond Jr. went on. “I was at the salad bar at our local health food store the other day?”

  “Is this relevant?” Jessica asked.

  “Please. I was standing there, trying to pick the chunks of broccoli out of the pasta salad, when a voice came on the radio. The health food store always plays the talk shows with the science segments. They were discussing the rights of gay couples, but that’s not the point. The point is, the commentator was saying, ‘Does anyone know how to define the word family?’ I put down the tongs and thought, Shit. She’s right.”

  Raymond Sr. took off his glasses and started cleaning them with his handkerchief. “I’m getting old. That’s all I know.”

  “Daddy’s getting old and I’m getting fat,” Helen said cheerfully.

  “And I’m getting exhausted by all this,” said Jessica. “How about that?”

  “I am so disappointed in you guys,” said Raymond Jr. He shook his head. “How can you be this way in front of my fiancée?”

  “Oh, Ray, please,” Claire said. It was the first she had spoken all night. “Don’t use the word ‘fiancée,’” she said. “It sounds so melodramatic.”

  “That’s exactly right,” said Jessica. “That’s just what we are. Nothing more than a cheap WASP melodrama.”

  “At least at the movies, they serve popcorn,” said Chris. “I thought I heard someone say something about fudge.”

  “That’s it,” said Helen. “Thank you, honey. I’m going to make it right now.”

  “Mom,” said Raymond Jr. “Please. Stay.” But she disappeared out the door, a slash of color.

  Please. Stay.

  On the bottom of the family letter Helen sent prior to the holiday to each of us, on my copy, at the bottom, she had written, “I think I’m lonely.” But at first it didn’t look that way. She was writing in script, the letters close together, and it looked more like, “I think I’m lovely.” One letter changed, and she would go from lonely to lovely. Though both sounded foreign, absurd.

  There was only one day left of vacation, and then Raymond would leave along with the rest of us. He had arrived like one of the children too, with a pillowcase of presents and a bag of dirty laundry. She kissed him the way she did her boys, holding his chin in one hand and looking into his eyes. Then she looked away. He had always called her Mother around the kids, but now the irony was not lost on her; it hobbled her. Her children had begun to take on the shapes of strangers, growing into their own lives, coming and going like shadows on the wall that didn’t stay but appeared here and there sporadically and then passed. She couldn’t piece together their various rhythms, the lives they lived without her now. Chris was supposed to be the last bird out of the nest, not her husband.

  “I’m bummed out,” Raymond had said to Dean and me that morning when we were having coffee with him in the dining room. “After you guys all split, Mom will be on her own.”

  Raymond was learning new words. “Split” was one of them. “Bummed” was another.

  “Not our job, Dad,” said Dean.

  “Couldn’t you two, at least, stay over for a day or so? Dean, you know Mom counts on you. Please. Stay. It would mean a lot.”

  I imagined Helen up in her sewing room off the kitchen, listening to this quiet conversation. To her husband’s low, conspiratorial voice, planning his escape. Please. Stay. It would mean a lot. I thought of Nonnie just then. The way she would clutch Helen’s hand at the dinner table to get her to stop clearing dinner dishes and listen to whatever story she was telling. Please. Stay. I require your full attention.

  On the ice it was different. The water in the lake had frozen a deep plum color, almost black. The afternoon sky was clear. Jessica was doing figure eights, carefully balancing on first one foot, then the other. The loops got bigger and bigger; then she’d
skate to another part of the lake and start again, first making very small loops, then gradually letting them grow. Her hands were in fists when she concentrated; her eyes never left the ice, set on the thin trails of a pattern she was carving out for herself.

  It was the last afternoon of vacation. Chris raced across the lake in pursuit of a hockey puck. He and Raymond Jr. and Dean had been hitting it back and forth. Claire did not want to skate. She sat on a stump near the edge, reading a book, a scarf double-wrapped around her neck and head. It was a welcome present from Helen; she escorted Claire to the yarn store as she had done with me and let her pick out her yarn. Claire chose a reddish-brown rust color Helen called “burnt sienna” that showed off her blonde hair.

  Across the ice, the puck raced toward me. I closed my eyes and swung the stick along the surface. It made a scratching sound but missed the puck entirely. “Keep your eyes open,” Dean called. “You can’t hit a dinosaur’s dick with your eyes closed.”

  “Yo, Raymond,” Chris called out, having intercepted the wayward puck.

  Dean headed left in a fast skid to block Chris’s shot. “Pay attention,” he called out behind him to me. “You’re the only teammate I’ve got out here, sweetheart.”

  He missed the block and his brothers scored another goal. From the stump Claire clapped her mittened hands. I lost my balance and fell.

  “Oh, sweet jeez,” Dean said, skating over to my side. He raised his hands to make the sign of a T. “Time-out, can I get some backup here? Jessica, get your buns over here.”

  But Jessica was concentrating on not being one of the boys, I knew that. Even if her lazy loops were boring her.

  “Two on one, then,” Chris said. “C’mon.”

  Dean and Raymond Jr. were skating hard, passing the puck back and forth. Their faces went serious when they played. Between shots, they would stand very tall, gliding, taking long breaths; then they’d focus, bend lower, and shoot. Chris made one quick circle around the lake, then joined them.

  The game changed. The skating got faster, the shots fiercer; the boys huffed, making clouds with their breath. The sun dropped slowly toward the tip of Mount Battie. The afternoon mottled.

  Another car pulled up beside Claire. She looked up from her book and realized it was Raymond. Now all three family cars stood in a row beside the frozen lake. “Oh god,” Dean said. He whistled to his brothers. “Fud alert.”

  Raymond moved slowly from the car. He was in his parka, with his hockey skates draped over one shoulder. His car was packed up with all his belongings, the pillowcases full of clean clothes and his new Christmas presents. He had promised Helen he would leave first, before the kids, so she could have one last night alone with us. A game of hockey would be a good way to sign off, he must have decided, rather than do it in front of Helen at home. We all worried what that good-bye might provoke. And no one wanted to be dragged to his new apartment for a housewarming. Even he admitted he didn’t want to make anyone deal with that yet, his brand-new one-bedroom rental in a development just at the base of Mount Battie. We were spared.

  In the cold air, Raymond squinted. “You guys doing two on one?” he called out to his sons. “How ’bout a real game?”

  “Yeah,” said Dean. “C’mon.”

  “Show us what you got, Dad,” Raymond Jr. said. He skated by the rim of the lake, scraping his stick behind him. “C’mon, I’ll take you on.”

  At the side of the lake, I unlaced my skates. Jessica joined me. “It’s getting too cold, anyway,” she said. “Let’s get Claire and take a walk around the lake.”

  On the stump, Claire shrugged. “I’m game, it’s getting too dark to read anyway.”

  In the cold air, the world seemed broad, but the woods hung close. We set off on the path around the lake, the dry branches snapping under our feet.

  “It’s almost a mile around,” said Jessica. “So if we do the whole thing, tonight we can have dessert.”

  Claire laughed. “I’ve never thought that way in my life,” she said. She had small hands and feet, small hiking boots and red socks. Docile and compact. Jessica wore calf boots with a small heel. She teetered as she walked.

  “Appearances,” Jessica said. “It’s all about appearances where I live and work.”

  From the ice, we heard a cry, then silence. We headed back to the lake. The boys were in a circle on the ice. Raymond lay below them on his back.

  “Holy chili peppers,” said Claire.

  “What’d you jerks do?” Jessica asked, wobbling down through the trees in her boots. “Kill Dad?”

  “I guess I got him in the forehead pretty good,” Raymond Jr. said. “Puck just went flying.”

  “I’m okay, bunny,” Raymond said. He tried to prop his head up.

  “He’s fine,” said Dean. “Just a head wound.” Blood was spreading out of the gash on Raymond’s head onto the ice. “Though we’re going to have to take him home to Mom. Here he is with his pillowcase of getaway supplies, and we have to bring the little runaway back home. Won’t she love that.”

  Raymond lay on his back on the ice. In the dark, his children were tall shadows above him. They stood with their hands on their hips. Trees. Conquerors. A solid mass of judgment.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Raymond said. “No one worry.”

  When we left, the next day, Raymond had returned to his new apartment, his head bandaged and his road ahead uncertain. Helen stood in the driveway outside the family home alone and waved as we turned onto Route 1. She had given him compresses and ice packs and he had left. He was gone.

  I think I’m lonely. One letter changed, and I would be lovely. What would that be like?

  I’m fine, I’m fine. No one worry.

  At the rehearsal dinner under the tent, Raymond’s toast had been the highlight. He had produced a letter Dean had written his parents once, when he was about ten or eleven. Raymond had saved it all these years, he told the group, for this very occasion. Dean’s rehearsal dinner. He held it up for all of us to see, a child’s handwriting on a simple piece of lined paper torn from what appeared to be a school notebook. Dean put his hand to his forehead and shook his head, smiling at his father. Raymond held one of the votive candles up and read it aloud, the candlelight reflecting in his gold-framed glasses. “Dear Family,” the letter said. “I am running away. I broke the window in my room with a baseball and I know you will never forgive me. So I am going to go be on my own now, from now on. I packed a sweater and some potato chips so Mom, you know I’ll be fine. Do not try to come after me. By the time you read this, I will already be gone. It’s better this way. Good-bye forever. Love, your son Dean.” The group erupted in laughter. “He came back by dinner, when he got hungry,” Raymond added. “We all pretended it had just never happened, and no one punished him for the broken window. We knew he cared too much about family to be away too long.” That was his message: Dean cares about family. Dean will be a good husband. As the group applauded, he took the letter, folded it back in its envelope, and showed us the crayoned child’s hand on the outside. “TO MY PARENTS,” it said. “OPEN RIGHT AWAY. IMPORTANT STUFF.” Then he brought it over and made a show of giving it to Dean. The two men embraced. It was then I thought of my own father’s toast, somewhere upstairs in the house among his stacks of papers maybe, his dark room empty as the wind blew off the sea. Such family happiness, I thought, watching Raymond and Dean embrace that night. I’m going to be a part of that family, I’m in that embrace.

  Looking at Raymond lying on the ice in the fading winter light, his children standing above him, I thought of his reading of that letter of Dean’s the night before our wedding. Dear family, I am running away. He was leaving. He had done something wrong, something capricious and beyond mending. I know you will never forgive me. Do not try to come after me, for I will be gone. He was running away. Far, far away. It’s better this way. A child’s escape. As far as the simple, bitter promise of freedom could carry him.

  Part Three

  XII
I

  In the Attic

  Soon after we were first married, Dean and I moved to an apartment on the Upper West Side, where all the windows faced south. At night, we could watch as the lights came on in the apartment buildings down Broadway. If we held a mirror out the window, we could see the Hudson River reflected off to the west.

  Evenings, I would listen to Dean play his guitar in the entryway of our apartment. The empty foyer, he said, was where we had the best acoustics. I would make dinner and he’d sit on a folding metal chair just outside the kitchen and sing; then the two of us would sit in the living room eating at the wooden table he had been given by his parents. It followed us from apartment to apartment, that table that had been the mainstay in the Jackson family kitchen for years. It was a beautiful, grown-up thing, I thought. If we were just playing house, living in a stage set that was our married life, then the wooden table, a deep chestnut, sturdy and gleaming, was the one true thing that grounded us center stage.

  Dean wanted the simple life, and I wanted the most beautiful KitchenAid mixer we could afford. A pale teal color, I thought, or perhaps bright orange. Something also sturdy, grounded, grown-up, useful, but with color. This seemed a minor thing, but once we were married, we spent entire dazed sunlit Saturday afternoons walking into every hardware store on upper Broadway, and leaving empty-handed because we couldn’t agree on a blender or a toaster, let alone a lifestyle. As the appliances broke down, one by one, over the course of five years, so did our marriage.

  In truth, things had gotten somewhat confusing. Dean had been spending a lot of time floating in an isolation tank owned by an elderly couple on Central Park West with flowing white hair. I was an editor at a literary magazine, a job that often involved late nights taking writers out to dinner with my boss. My evenings and Dean’s didn’t blend all that well, at least not once he wanted me to get in the tank and I wanted him to accompany me to low-lit bistros all over town.