“I do, don’t I? Thanks.” I am beaming.
Will wants to know, or at least he asks, “How old are your kids?”
“Thirteen and almost twenty.”
“The girl’s only thirteen? She looks older.”
“My daughter, your niece, Tara, turned thirteen in January.” It’s obvious he doesn’t get my point, but Emily does.
“I always have trouble telling the ages of—” Emily glares at him, but he’s already stopped himself.
“That’s okay,” I say jovially. “Martin says he has trouble telling white people apart, too. We all kind of look alike.”
There’s uncomfortable chuckling. Then Will asks, “How old were they when you got them?”
“My son was twelve and my daughter was seven when they came to us.”
“Have you had trouble with them?”
We have, but it seems a betrayal to say so to him. I shrug. “It’s an adventure.”
Emily sighs dreamily. “It’s wonderful what you and Martin have done. Taking in kids who need homes. It makes me proud to be your sister.”
Both her admiration and my pride in it make me snippy. “We get as much as we give.”
“You’re heroes.”
“We’re parents, Emily. These are our children.”
“Why didn’t you have your own?” That’s Vaughn, who has no kids.
Emily jumps in. “Vaughn, for God’s sake, maybe they can’t—”
“As far as we know we can. We chose to adopt. And Tara and Ramon are our own.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” I tell them all, especially Daddy who hasn’t said a word, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Galen is characteristically the first to lose patience. “Don’t be so touchy, Alexandra. You always were so damn touchy.”
This is my fault. The trouble she has deliberately brought into her life, the risk she is taking, are direct results of how I brought her up. Intending to give her a gift, I have cursed her. Meaning to teach my child to be more than I could be, imagining her as my masterpiece and gift to the world, I have put her in danger. I can scarcely look at her.
“It’s good to have you home,” Emily says quietly to me. “I’ve really missed you.”
This isn’t home. Home is with my husband and my children, in a city far away. “I’ve missed you, too, Em,” and as I say it missing her comes flooding over me so I’m not really lying.
“Nobody calls me Em but you.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No.” Shyly, she touches my shoulder. “No, I mean, it’s your special big-sister nickname for me. It’s nice to hear it again.”
“Are you happy, Em? I mean, overall, with your life?”
Her hand goes to her distended belly. She looks around at the assembled crowd, much of which she’s directly responsible for. “I don’t know about happy. That’s a little strong. I’m content. That’s enough for me. Most of the time.” She glances at me, glances away. “Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to do something else.” I see how tired she is. “Then I feel guilty.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“You, too? Really? You wonder what your life would have been like if you’d taken a different path?” This time her glance is coy. “Stayed here, for instance?”
“That was one of Daddy’s favourite poems.” This is a diversionary tactic. It also feels like a sudden revelation, as if I hadn’t remembered about the poem.
“ ‘The Road Not Taken.’ Robert Frost.” I’m surprised and not entirely pleased that she knows what I’m talking about. Despite having all these kids and living out here in the boonies, my little sister is not the rube I’d like to make her out to be.
We recite a few lines together and chuckle. Cautiously, I ask her, “Did you have to memorize it, too?”
“Oh, no, not me. You were his poetry buddy. I just learned it from listening to you.”
She’s challenging me, and we both hear the defensive edge in my voice when I counter, “I can’t imagine why he liked that particular poem so much. He’s led a pretty constricted life, if you ask me. He certainly didn’t take the road less travelled by, that I know of.”
“But you did. So he didn’t have to.” That snotty tone takes me back twenty-five years.
A chill runs through me. I rub my arms. “Well, anyway, all paths lead through the same woods. Or some such bullshit.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
“Beats me. Sounds profound, though, don’t you think?”
For a long beat she stares at me. Then we burst into riotous laughter that quickly has less to do with the amusement of the moment than with shared history and sweet old habit and older love. She puts her arm around me. I lean my head on her shoulder.
Herpie coils in the weeds at the edge of the yard. To say she is glaring would be to anthropomorphize, but I do feel her concentrated, lidless gaze. I have not consciously summoned her, and I have in mind no particular task for her at the moment, but I am neither surprised nor displeased to find her here. She is, in a word, familiar.
Eva Marie had an absurd terror of snakes. Of caterpillars, and night crawlers, too, and I trust that Vaughn’s green horned tomato worms or an eel if she had ever seen one would have elicited the same slapstick response. She shrieked. She hooted. She flapped her elbows and hands. She hopped on one foot and then the other. She climbed atop rocks and stumps, the hood of the car, the swaying porch rail. Once, when the boys not entirely by accident spilled their bucket of fishing worms in the kitchen, she climbed in her nightgown onto the counter. It was hard not to laugh. Even now, those memories make my lips twitch.
Although she did not say so, it seems plausible that Eva Marie left because of Herpie. She would not share her husband with anything cold-blooded and legless.
“Are you happy, Em?” I press.
“I think this is the life I was meant to live.”
“Meant? By whom?”
“Oh, you know. God. The universe. Fate.”
“Daddy?” Realizing I’ve been holding my breath, I’m careful to exhale gradually.
“I don’t think Daddy much cared what any of us did with our lives except you.”
“Em.”
“Well, it’s true.”
One of her daughters, Eileen or Eve, steps up onto the deck carrying glasses of iced lemonade. A pretty, disdainful girl, she just stands there. “Thanks, hon.” Unable to reach the tray, Emily flails with one hand in a gesture that’s supposed to be comic but clearly disgusts her daughter. “Come closer, come closer. I can’t reach over your little sister or brother here.”
A furious blush colours my niece’s neck and face. She hands her mother one glass and me the other, then stalks off, wiping her hands on her white shorts. Emily sighs and shakes her head. “The mere fact of this baby’s existence embarrasses her to death. The mere fact of my existence embarrasses her to death.”
“It’s the age. She’ll get over it.”
“I suppose.”
“Too bad we didn’t have a mother to embarrass us when we were that age.”
“You’ve never heard from her, have you?”
“No. Em. I’d have told you.” She doesn’t answer. I can’t let this go. “Emily, do you hear me? I wouldn’t have kept something like that a secret from you and the boys.”
“Okay.” But she is not entirely convinced.
“Why do you suppose she left?” I don’t think we’ve ever directly asked each other this question. Even now, it’s less a real query than a conversational gambit, an effort to claim and hold my sister’s attention.
She’s thought about this. She answers readily, looking not at me but at the family thronging our father’s yard, which is really no more than a clearing in the woods. “I think the very fact of our existence embarrassed her to death.”
It s
trikes me that this might be a clue of some sort. “To death?”
“Give me a break, Sandi, it’s just a figure of speech.”
“Well,” I say, intending to chuckle wryly but coughing instead to clear the telltale constriction in my throat, “I guess the good news and the bad news is that there wasn’t a lot we could do about the fact of our existence.”
“I thought about it. Don’t tell me you didn’t, too.” Her tone is conspiratorial, almost breezy, as if the memory we’re sharing here is innocent and sweet.
“Thought about what?” I want her to say it. We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment. Finally, characteristically, I’m the one who names it. “Suicide?”
Something across the clearing gives her an excuse to look away, and she leans forward, calls to one of the kids to stop that.
“Emily? Are you saying you thought about suicide?”
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
“No!”
Not having expected the ambush, I don’t get out of the way fast enough. “You wouldn’t. You’re Daddy’s girl.”
Our mother used to say that all the time. After she left the others took it up, Emily especially. I hate it when I cry out of anger. Resisting the urge to punch her even if she is a pregnant woman, or to stomp into our father’s house and shut myself in, I settle for snarling “Fuck you!” in the vicious undertone only siblings can achieve with each other.
“Watch your mouth,” she reminds me with a smug equanimity that further infuriates me. Just like when we were kids and she, the little sister, had a better handle on things than I did. I flip her off in the private space between our two chairs, where nobody else can see. Unfortunately, she doesn’t see, either.
Daddy’s in the chaise lounge at the other end of the deck. His eyes are closed. I flip him off, too.
Adrift. The fatigue has unmoored me from time and place and purpose. Everything I have discovered and invented for keeping the world in order has melted, the spells and incantations and images and poetry, and I am adrift.
Someone says, “Daddy?”
Right at that moment, I don’t know how to answer to that name.
“Daddy? Are you all right?”
I do not recognize the voice. I do not recognize this sun-hatted, double-chinned, broad-shouldered woman. For just a second I do not recognize the name she calls me. I am so tired. “I have something to show you,” says my daughter Alexandra, shy and excited as a child, glancing up and then down from under her broad-brimmed hat. Out of her pocket she pulls something, a letter, an airmail letter, and holds it out for me to take. I do not accept it. “It’s a surprise,” she tells me, the very idea of which exhausts me even more. I do not ask what it is, but she presumes to inform me anyway. “It’s a letter from your relatives in the Old Country. Our family.”
“Oh!” Indeed, I am surprised, mostly pleasantly although there is also a frisson of dread. She wants me to take the letter from her hand, but that is asking too much. “How did they find you?”
“I found them. For the past few years I’ve been doing a little detective work, and I finally found them. I wrote to them months ago and didn’t hear back, and I thought it was the wrong family, or they weren’t there anymore, or they weren’t interested in corresponding with their American relatives.” She is talking too much. There are too many words. I am assaulted by her eager words. “But just a few days before I left to come here, this letter came.” She flaps it at me, then gives up and pulls the flimsy letter out of the flimsy envelope. “Here, I’ll read it to you.”
I do not have enough energy to hear this letter, or any other missive from any other source. But I also do not have the energy to escape. She settles herself and reads.
She is a good reader if I do say so myself, although she still tends to rush. “Slow down,” I interrupt to instruct her. She does not like it, but she does as I say, and for a while I luxuriate in the rhythm and timbre of her voice, bequests from me and, in the circular way of so many things, hers back to me. She could be reading Keats or Aldous Huxley or the morning paper.
He’s not paying attention. He’s not interested. I put a lot of time and effort into finding these long-lost relatives for him, because he used to say he’d like to travel to the Old Country someday and meet his father’s family. I even thought maybe we could go together. This was meant as a gift. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t accept it. I read the letter anyway, goddammit, but I might as well have saved my breath. Daddy is a son of a bitch.
Too much. I do not know these people. Alexandra can do this. I cannot. It is not required of me. Alexandra can reach out into the world. I am gratified to see that she can, but I do not have to like it, and I certainly do not have to do it with her.
Emily’s shadow falls across us. The word “akimbo” has always amused me, and her arms are akimbo now, heels of her hands pressed against her lower back. “What’s that?”
“It’s a letter from our relatives in Slovakia.”
“Really? Wow! Daddy, you’ve always said—” Her face goes ashen and she catches her breath.
“Em? Emily? You okay?”
She nods, but it’s a moment before she can speak. “I’ve been having sharp pains the last couple days. Two or three in a row and then they stop.”
“Contractions?” Her due date is September 15, three more months.
A bevy of children, most of them hers, bursts out of the house. From his station at the barbecue grill, Earl yells at them to settle down. They don’t. When I look back at my sister, colour has returned to her face and she’s on her way to tend to the problem.
“Would you like something to drink, Daddy?” He moistens his lips but doesn’t answer. He is goddamn going to answer me. “Daddy. Do you want something to drink? Ice tea? Lemonade?”
“I would like a beer, please.”
“A beer?”
He opens his eyes and fixes me with a pale grey stare. “Would you like to see identification, Alexandra?”
Before I check the refrigerator for beer, I tear the letter into four pieces, all of which could still be read if anyone ever cared to try, and toss them into the trash can under the sink.
Chapter 3
She does not write. How can this be? She writes only reports and memos for the companies she works for, the occasional newsletter article. This is not art. She creates no beauty, expresses no horror, nothing new or important. Nothing that will mark her passage through this world, or mine.
Who does she think she is? This is not what I raised her to be. This is not why I sacrificed and suffered. I could have taken the easier and safer route and just not bothered to train a sinecure and standard-bearer for everything I have always prized but been too weak to act upon. Connections to other people. Expansive love. Tolerance. Writing. I could have just given up and let it all abort.
Instead, with enormous cost to myself, I gave it to Alexandra, the child among all my children who had more than ordinary potential. And she has squandered it. She has betrayed my trust.
Reading aloud to my father is almost more than I can bear. Almost more than I’m willing to bear, because it makes me so vulnerable to something he set in motion before I can remember, long before I had any choice in the matter. Something that started bright and dark and tangled between us and then spread out and came loose and is now folding back over.
Folding back over me, at least, suffocating me, pinning me down. The effect on him is no clearer to me than it’s ever been. He’s impassive in his chair, hands on scrawny thighs. Whenever I’m brave enough to glance at his face, his only expression is that impacted expressionlessness I never have been able to decipher. Yellow-grey bands of sunlight through the dusty slats of a window shade move across his cheek, forehead, bald head. Three weeks, actually twenty-two days, I’ve been back here—three times as long as I told Martin I could tolerate, a million times longer than I’d ever have expected—and noth
ing, nothing has made itself clear.
I’ve always loved reading aloud and being read to. I adore books on tape and author readings, and much prefer staged readings to fully mounted plays. When public radio airs storytelling or cowboy poetry or a segment from somebody’s new novel, I pause in whatever I’m doing to revel in it. Everything I write I read aloud, even the most pedestrian of inter-office memos, and often I have my assistant read the more substantial things to me so I can judge how my words play in another voice.
Reading to each other—poetry, prose poetry, essays; any form short enough to accommodate interruptions of other, related sorts of passion—was a mainstay of my brief, sweet courtship these many years ago with the man who became my husband. Martin was and is a wonderful reader in several languages, and an equally accomplished listener. Reading still soothes when one of us is sick or sad or frantic about the kids or too tired to sleep, still is all of a piece with the numerous other passions of our marriage.
Reading aloud to Ramon and Tara, well past the age when most parents are relieved and sad that most kids have outgrown it, helped us make up for time lost among us. Long legs dangling, they’d sit on our laps for bedtime stories, and to this day their father’s voice reading can calm them like nothing else. Maybe they’ll read to their children, my father’s legacy passed along to generations he refuses to claim.
I had children of my own before I could acknowledge that my love of reading aloud and being read to came from my father. Of all the things he imposed on me, this one is most my own, so fundamental a part of me that I might have been born with it. He must have read to me when I was an infant, maybe when I was still in the womb—an image that for a long time has given me the creeps. The discovery that I’m grateful to him, here in his dingy and shimmering yellow living room, stops me short. He waits for me to go on. Or maybe he’s asleep.
I am remembering. Harbouring no illusion that this scene is occurring here and now, I nonetheless give it my full attention, so that to an outside observer I doubtless appear out of touch with reality.
“What’s this?” This was my cousin’s son, therefore my cousin in some degree, a boy about two years younger than I named Roger. We shared a room. I shared his room. I was an interloper in his room. My cousins had agreed to keep me for a few weeks until my parents recovered from the influenza. My parents did not recover. My cousins had not committed to rearing another child, and they did not. They allowed me to live among them. They fed and clothed me, and they were not unkind. But it would have been too much to expect them to give me a home.
The Yellow Wood Page 3
