Family Reunion

  “He has not!” I yelled, thus satisfying at least one of DeWitt's requirements. I jumped up to get rid of DeWitt's hands on my knees, and DeWitt jumped up to emphasize his point, and New Yorkers that we are, we forgot about being in a very small boat, and we flipped.

  It's an effective way to get somebody's hands off your knees. We sank into the icy-cold water—because a northern Vermont lake is not toasty even in July—and came up sputtering and casting blame on each other, especially over my sunglasses, which were now trout property. Then we had to right the boat, which was hard, and get our two bodies back in, which was the most embarrassing exhibition of bad coordination in Vermont that year, and then bail it out and also rescue the oars.

  “I guess that's what it is to be unstable,” said DeWitt, grinning. Lake water ran off his hair, got caught in his thick, wide eyebrows and became little brooks going down the sides of his cheeks. He looked different with his hair plastered down. Older and more interesting.

  “I am not unstable,” I said sharply. I took the oars myself to ensure that we would row to my dock and not to his.

  DeWitt leaned back dramatically, locking his hands behind his head to make himself a pillow. He stared up at the sky as if he were a young intellectual at an English university, punting down the river. I was very proud of my rowing. I also kind of liked the way my wet T-shirt fit. We reached our dock, and I handed him the oars and stepped out onto the splintery gray wood.

  “When you get back from your family reunion,” he said, “I won't be here. We're going camping for a week, my grandfather and my father and I. We're hiking part of the Appalachian Trail, and then we all head on home to the city.”

  I was stunned. “You—you won't be here?” I whispered. “I—I won't see you again?”

  DeWitt grinned so broadly his mouth seemed to curl around to his ears. He stuck an oar into the air, like the recipient of an athletic trophy, and yelled, “You're going to miss me!” using the singsong tune of “I've got a secret.”

  He rowed off backward, singing as loudly as an opera star. “She's going to miss me. She's going to miss me.”

  Lake people on porches, docks and boats applauded.

  Oh, he was as embarrassing in public as Angus. It had just taken him longer to show his true colors. I stomped up to the house and slammed the screened door behind me.

  Annette was preoccupied with Granger Elliott's job offer. You could see her weigh the pros and cons, tilting from one side to the other, studying an invisible balance sheet in her palm.

  Daddy had been equally preoccupied by the job offer. Over and over he said he had not married Annette to acquire an at-home mother for his children. He had married her because he loved her. Still and all, if she took the regular job, he too would have to take a regular job, because he was traveling a lot, and now our actual mother was too far away to pitch in for a sick kid or whatever. It was okay, he said quickly, but it had to be thought through.

  So what with all these things to settle and think through, Daddy didn't drive back to Montreal, and he didn't drive back to New York either. He fixed the boathouse roof. He removed the bomb shelter door permanently. He took all 1958 soup cans to the dump. He circled Annette, watched her warily from across the room and took her out for dinner and said he really, really loved the blue and yellow fabric, even though my father has never had a cloth thought in his life.

  I called Marley and Bev and Kelsey, and I meant to tell them everything, but I didn't. I listened instead. Marley had a maybe boyfriend. Bev had a maybe job as a model. Kelsey had a definite boyfriend. It was terrible to be a mere listener. Everything I had to say stuck in my throat. I didn't share my maybe summer boyfriend, DeWitt, and I didn't share my maybe brother, Toby, and I didn't share my maybe half-gone stepmother. I could hear, but not talk. They were my best friends—but something (geography? loyalty?) kept me from confiding.

  Grandma called from Arizona. She too was on her way to Barrington. She had wonderful presents for us and a new digital video camera and lots of things we could only guess at. Angus and I tried to guess anyway. We love presents.

  Aunt Maggie called for last-minute plane arrival details and said she had made enough potato salad to drown in, and also lime Jell-O with shredded carrots in it, and shortcake for strawberries, and homemade peach ice cream. Angus didn't even tell her he would die before eating lime green Jell-O with shredded carrots in it. He requested that a pint, possibly two, of the peach ice cream be reserved for him personally.

  The reunion started to feel possible and maybe even fun. I planned things to do with my cousin Carolyn, and secrets to tell. I got stranded on those secrets, like a swimmer at low tide, thinking of the secret that might or might not exist.

  And then Daddy dropped a little bomb of his own.

  Not the Toby bomb.

  “The company has scheduled a retreat,” he said. “I have no choice. I have to go. My career's on the line. So I have to miss the start of the family reunion. You three will go on without me. I'll catch up later.”

  He beamed at us hopefully, as if he were Angus's age, a twelve-year-old hoping a big, wide smile under red hair and freckled nose would make everything okay.

  Annette didn't yell at Daddy for abandoning her to the clutches of the in-laws she hardly knew, and she didn't yell at Angus for causing all this, and she didn't yell at me for standing around doing nothing. She just sagged.

  I could not bear it if she got all saggy when we met the Perfects. She had turned out pretty decent there for a while. I wanted to put her on display, like a new car; let them drive her around a little, admire the paint job, try out the accessories, and agree that Daddy had done all right for himself after all.

  But he hadn't. And he was abandoning her, and us, to face his family reunion without him. Was he ashamed of her? Of us? Or would Celeste really be there, and he couldn't handle it?

  Or would Toby be there, and he really couldn't handle that?

  “What is this?” demanded the security guard, although anybody could see that it was a leg. She peered down the hollow leg, squinting, as if finding some distant horizon down toward the knee.

  “It's my brother's leg,” I said.

  The leg was long, curvy and slim, with red-painted toe-nails. “Your brother's leg,” she repeated.

  “I'm just holding it for him,” I explained.

  Annette pretended to be having purse problems. She shuffled through credit cards and debit cards and receipts and pencils without tips. She has one of those bottomless-pit handbags, almost a suitcase, that holds her entire life and part of ours. It matches nothing, so no matter what Annette wears and how good she looks, the outfit falls apart the minute she hoists that handbag. She located a lipstick. Annette loves to buy new lipstick, and previous lipsticks gather at the bottom of her purse, adding weight and substance. She was currently using Tiger Eye. Of course if your tiger actually had eyes that color, you would know it had a dreaded infection.

  They searched me thoroughly, including my shoes. I hoped they would search Angus twice as thoroughly, since it was his leg.

  Angus raced up, waving a poster he had bought in the airport gift shop. “I can keep it from getting wrinkled by stuffing it down my leg,” he said happily.

  Four security guards considered this possibility. “What exactly is the leg for?” asked one of them.

  “Annoying my cousins,” said Angus.

  They nodded. “Should work.” They put it through the X ray, to make sure it wasn't carrying lethal instruments. I decided it was not the time to describe Angus as a lethal instrument, although I was closing in on that opinion. Angus begged and pleaded to be searched, including all body cavities, but the guards, like others in Angus's life, had already tired of him and waved him through.

  “These are your children?” they asked Annette.

  “Stepchildren,” she said quickly. She was wearing a white cotton dress of the Indian sort—a million gathers of pre-wrinkled gauze. It had begun its life limp; now in
the heat of August it was limper, and by the time we got off the plane it would be limpest. Her necklace had twisted so that the clasp and not the pendant hung in front. Her hair was collecting in her face.

  She did not look like a wicked stepmother, but a whipped one.

  Incredibly, they let us on board with the leg.

  It was a huge plane. We were in the center of a row with five seats across, and none of us had an aisle seat. The leg did not fit beneath the seat in front of Angus. The luggage compartments over our heads were already full, but Angus stood on tiptoe on his seat and made an effort to rearrange other people's stuff and jam his leg into the space. Shoving at the plaster toes, he muttered to himself that people had awfully big suitcases these days.

  The businesswoman sitting on the aisle between Angus and freedom closed her eyes and steeled herself for a long ride. When the flight attendant returned, the businesswoman asked if there were any open seats she could move to.

  “No,” said the flight attendant, deeply sympathetic, “but at least I can put the leg in the garment-bag closet up front. Little boy, may I take that for you?”

  Angus handed it over silently. In his hands, the leg looked comical, but when the flight attendant held it up against her trim little uniform and crisp little scarf and perky little hair, the leg was a body part, as if detectives would shortly find a torso and skull under other seats. Angus sank back against the cushions and buckled his seat belt. “I shouldn't have brought it,” he whispered to me. After a long time, he said, “I shouldn't have brought my collections either.”

  He had packed a whole suitcase full of stuff he planned to show off to Brett. I could not imagine the sixteen-year-old who would waste time on Angus's junk. I was relieved that we were going to keep Angus's crazy treasures a secret. Then, very softly, he whispered, “I don't actually care if the Perfects laugh at me. I don't actually mind if they think I'm a jerk. But they're going to laugh at Annette, aren't they?”

  “I don't think they'll laugh at her in front of us,” I whispered back. “The thing is, Angus, since Daddy isn't here, we have to take his place. We have to be Annette's protection.”

  Angus moaned softly.

  “What's the matter?” asked Annette.

  “Ummmm,” said Angus, who is an excellent liar, but was derailed at the moment. “I was thinking of my suitcase of stuff. I shouldn't have brought it. I should have brought clothes, like you suggested. Maybe I'll just abandon it at the baggage claim.”

  “Then the airport police would come after us,” said Annette. “I just barely didn't get arrested for child abuse when I left you guys with the neighbors. What would happen to me if I started abandoning heavy items at airports? Suitcases whose contents cannot be explained by normal persons?”

  The businesswoman on the aisle shuddered. We had already been judged and found lacking. It was easy to imagine how the Perfects would see us.

  Annette got out her cross-stitch. She loves embroidery. She is forever making authentic Early American samplers to frame in dark wood and hang all over our walls. Wherever you turn, there is a little piece of reading material that will make you a better person and let you see a row of tulips and hearts as well. But during the entire flight, Annette never even got around to threading her needle. She just sat staring at the little cross-stitch cottage, with its little cross-stitch roof and its tidy cross-stitch trees. I thought it was probably the life she had expected to live: all lined up and facing the right way.

  Angus, who loves airline food and often patrols the aisle asking innocent passengers if he can have their little packs of salted nuts, sat motionless. He didn't talk. I would not have said Angus was capable of silence.

  All that silence gave me time to wrestle with what was coming. Joanna had called up late the night before on my phone, not the family phone, so I had not felt obligated to tell anybody about it. “I'm coming after all!” she cried. “Isn't that wonderful? Aren't you thrilled? You guys were having such a great summer, and I'm stuck here and I'm tired of Jean-Paul and France, and I never want to do anything again that starts with the letter c like castles or cathedrals or concerts or culture. So I'll be there in two days.”

  I don't want you, I thought. If you come, you'll be the one who's friends with Carolyn and goes places with Brett and finds out about Toby and stays up with the grown-ups sharing high school memories. You'll be in front of me, in charge of me, older than me, more interesting than me. “That's great, Jo,” I said.

  What an awful age fourteen is: Everybody changing shape, like summer becoming fall. The shape of my body was changing without my permission, but the shock was the changing shape of my family. I never gave anybody permission to change my parents, my address and my life. And now, equally without my permission, the posture of my love for Joanna had changed.

  Am I growing up, I thought, or just growing mean?

  “I've got the most wonderful clothes now,” said Joanna smugly. “Wait till you see; you'll die. You can borrow anything, though, because I have so much.”

  She's going to be Perfect, too, I thought. She'll be part of them, not us.

  “I'll take charge, Shelley,” said my sister confidently. “We'll push Annette into a corner and let her fade there.”

  When Joanna had flown to Paris, on the day school ended in early June, Annette had still been an interloper.But since then, we had dealt with bomb shelter time-shares. Gone for bagels in Boston. Paraded hollow legs around town. Sold zinnias by leaping in front of cars. We were almost—well, within a mountain range or two— a family.

  “Annette's not so bad,” I said.

  Joanna laughed scornfully “What—is she listening?” said my sister.

  What if, when we got to Barrington, Joanna was the interloper in our family? Somebody who lopes around, getting in between you and what you care about. If she didn't get between me and anything else, Joanna would certainly get between me and attention. How could my summer hold a candle to hers? Even my sunglasses weren't going to measure up to hers.

  I knew then that nobody would squeeze lemons for lemonade. They would dump imitation lemonade powder into a Tupperware jug and swish it around and toss it over ice cubes, and it wouldn't count.

  The plane landed.

  It was so bumpy a landing that the whole plane held its breath and exhaled in unison once we were definitely down. My hands had gone cold. We shuffled out of the plane into the red-carpeted arm of the terminal. I hate those portable folding hallways. I feel as if I'm in a vacuum cleaner, about to be sucked up into something suffocating.

  “Is my hair all right?” whispered Annette. Her hair looked awful. “You look great, Annette,” I told her.

  She got out her purse mirror to check. “I look terrible. You were being kind. You know you've touched bottom when a stepchild is kind.”

  “There they are!” shouted Angus, running ahead. Whatever had silenced him during the flight had evaporated.

  The Perfects were in a row, neatly arranged by height, just as I had remembered them. Grandma was the shortest, her hair whiter and thinner. She beamed and held out her arms for Angus. Aunt Maggie was next, streaky blond and beautiful in sleek white trousers with a crisp navy top and polka-dotted accessories and fragile sandals. Uncle Todd was in khaki pants, a safari shirt and sneakers so white he must have bought them an hour before. Carolyn was taller than her father, looking cool and calm and only slightly interested. She raised an eyebrow as Angus whooped and hollered and flung himself on his relatives.

  I'm afraid, I thought. It's like school. It's a test. We're Perfect—are you? What's your score? Where do you rank? Our expectations are low.

  I will be Perfect, I told myself. I will make Annette Perfect. I will kill anybody who implies by a single syllable that Daddy is anything other than Perfect. When my Perfect sister arrives, I will Perfectly defer to her.

  I advanced smoothly, as if on wheels. This would set the pace for our whole visit.

  “Wait!” cried the flight attendant. She
raced up to me. “You forgot your leg!” she shouted, thrusting it into my arms.

  Uncle Todd and Angus were in the workshop off the three-car garage, drilling, because Uncle Todd said the leg would be easier to carry around if it had a rope sling.

  “Like a submachine gun!” said Angus happily. “Just casually thrown over my shoulder.”

  Uncle Todd's approval of everything Angus was and said and had brought on the plane had restored Angus's spirits. It had not done the same for Annette. “I'm going to carry a lifelong grudge against that flight attendant,” Annette said to me.

  Aunt Maggie said primly, “Perhaps Angus should not have been permitted to bring the leg to start with. I can well imagine that Charlie would have been entertained by it, however. My brother always likes to draw attention to himself. That's why I know he will love this weekend. When is his flight getting in?”

  Annette looked vague.

  Great, I thought. Wife Number Three has no idea when husband's flight arrives. We're talking seriously Not Perfect here. “Why?” I said brightly. “Do you have something planned, Aunt Maggie? Here. Let me help carry the glasses and drinks outside.”

  But Carolyn and Aunt Maggie had this under control, of course, and we headed for the backyard, which was nothing like I remembered. Gone was the torn, sagging badminton net, replaced by a long, slim lap pool with blue tiles and yellow stripes underwater. Gone was the patchy grass, replaced by lovely decks and well-planned stretches of brick. Gone were the holes dug by the neighbor's dog. Now everything was edged by impressive gardens, where flowers stood tall and bloomed bright.

  Carolyn poured iced tea into frosted glasses, adding slices of lemon and passing a tiny plate of tiny cookies, which probably had a tiny amount of flavor. I happen to detest iced tea. You can add sugar for days and still not have a drink worth pouring down your throat.