Annie with her long, long neck. Too long. I used to wonder which possibility I should dread more for my daughter: that she would grow into that neck, or that she wouldn’t.
Annie would trade me in for Mia in half a heartbeat, but Betts assures me her Isabelle went through a phase of this excessive Mia-love, too. “Mia gets to parachute in from whatever exotic place she’s on her way to or from,” she says. “Bearing godmother gifts that our daughters mistake for pumpkin-disguised carriages. Ones that will take them off to exciting lives like hers. You can’t compete with that. You just have to let it blow over and be glad it’s Mia and not some nutcase your daughter has fallen for. Like that jerk you dated that first summer in law school. What was his name? Or his scrawny brother who thought he could take over when—Steve! That was his name. When Steve left for New York.”
I guess the truth is I’d trade me in for Mia, too. She hasn’t ever been the prettiest of us, or even the smartest, probably, but there is a casual joy in her that creeps up on you, that makes you reluctant to walk away from the way she makes you feel about yourself. So I try not to worry that my own daughter prefers her to me, that my son does, too. And I think I’m succeeding, but then every bullshit rejection I get back, from The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Poetry, comes with a scrawl of ink on the form saying they aren’t wild about motherhood poems, do I have anything else? Poems that aren’t even about motherhood. Poems about red giants, pulsars, neutron stars, supernovae, black holes, the Rosette Nebula.
Am I anything but a mother anymore? I’m not even a daughter now. I’m a spouse, true, at least for the moment. I’m a sister who almost never sees her brothers. And I am a friend; there is that. I guess that’s the oldest decent relationship I have left, this friendship with Laney and Mia and Betts.
Who are, it appears, no better sailors than they were thirty years ago.
“The cleat, Laney! Wrap it around the cleat!” I call out, jumping to the pier before the boat swings farther and Laney either lets go of the docking line or follows it into the bay. Thank God for Mia at the helm.
Mia will sleep with Max this weekend. The thought catches me by surprise as he emerges from below deck, where I’ve forgotten all about him. The way he helps Mia while I secure the boat makes me a little … not jealous, exactly. I certainly would never sleep with Max. He’s a schlumpy dresser, for one thing, which I know doesn’t seem like it would matter once we were in bed, but it would. He dresses like Steven used to, but not: the same blue jeans, the same outdoor-guy jacket over a T-shirt, or sometimes a button-down. But he fills it all differently. Or fails to fill it. Clothes droop on Max where on Steven they wrapped up sex appeal. Max is losing his hair, which my husband, Ted, is too, of course, but Ted wears his baldness with confidence while Max clings to what’s left as if longer hair on the sides can make up for a shortage on top. Probably even Steven is balding, though; I haven’t seen him since I visited him in New York the fall of our first year, when Mia always kept her knickers on and I was the promiscuous one. I was so proud of myself back then. Or I thought I was. Imagined I was? Pretended I was? It’s hard to understand, even now, how I felt back then, why I claimed to be the girl I did.
Mia looks like she needs a baggie even more than that miniature Sonnets did the last time we arrived here: her hair is blown every which way, in short, thinnish wisps that pivot around her cowlick. Her nose is red from the cold, and she’s got that tacky little camera at her neck. Yet she looks happy. It’s there not just in her face but also in the way she moves, in her unconscious comfort with her body. Maybe it’s the way Max sets his hand on her hip as she steps from the boat now. To steady her, of course, but the way she smiles back at him suggests there’s electricity in that touch.
I’m the one who startles as if shocked, though. Shit! Have we said anything we ought not to have said with Max aboard? We haven’t, I don’t think. We haven’t.
“Don’t drop that swanky camera in the bay, Mia. That’d be quite a loss now, wouldn’t it?” Max says with a tease in his voice that makes it clear to me, at least, that the current runs both ways. I wonder if Max’s daughter would love Mia, too, or if that’s just a Baby Bradwell thing.
As I offer a hand to steady her from boat to pier, I wonder what it would be like to be free of the expectations of a husband and children, not forever on the brink of letting everyone down. To flirt with some journalist in Madagascar, or some guide in someplace so foreign it would seem another world. A man my age or older or younger, who maybe speaks my language or maybe, more intriguingly, does not.
I wonder if Mia ever flirts with women, or even goes home with them. I don’t know why, but the idea seems less improbable than I would have imagined. The thought, I see, reflects a deeply imbedded prejudice even I can’t shake, despite all Mother’s efforts to change the way we think: the eligible bachelor vs. the old maid, or the lesbian.
Mia’s flat, sensible shoes take easily to the wood pier, her ankles where they show between slacks and shoes unstockinged, nearly as red as her nose. My own stockings are shredded to hell. Funny, the way I dressed so damned carefully for a day in Washington, an evening in New York, only to end up on the water. Who was I dressing for, anyway? For the press cameras I imagined might capture Betts and Laney and Mia and me? For my friends?
Max helps Betts step ashore, then joins us as Mia says, “The house looks exactly the same.”
Victorian shingle-style architecture, built in 1893, Mother used to tell everyone. If the house has any flaws, she never mentioned them. It looks abandoned now, though. Haunted. Not in a ramshackle way, but in the way an old dog, left behind on his master’s death, lies prone, his face on his paws, patiently awaiting a return that will never be.
“Exactly the same,” Mia repeats with a quick glance at Max (who is looking his Max-goofiest, his hair trying to escape his head in little wisps like Mia’s).
Max, surely you’ll meet me at the Ritz at five. / Hurry up somebody’s dead, we’re still alive. The line from Anne Sexton’s “February 20th” comes to mind along with a vision of Sexton in her mother’s fur coat as she wrote the lines, the coat she wore three years later when she locked herself in her garage with the car running.
I ask Max if we couldn’t impose on him to help us get our things up to the house. He looks away just as I see echoed in his eyes my own reluctance to enter this place I’ve come to think of as Mother’s tomb.
He focuses on Mia, which she must feel because she raises her camera, hiding behind it as she takes a shot of Max. She will sleep with him, I decide. The only question is where, and perhaps whether it will mean anything. A thought which, oddly, leaves me imagining Max and Mia and Ted and me out here on the island together, boating to the Pointway Inn for dinner or playing cards in the Tea Parlor, lying out on the pier late at night identifying stars.
Mia is wrong about Chawterley, of course. It isn’t exactly the same. Max starts explaining this, in Mother’s defense or to keep Mia’s attention or in embarrassment at being photographed, I’m not sure which. He trots out the details of the library Mother added five years ago. I find myself saying, “Max designed it all,” the first time he pauses for a breath, before Mia can disparage it as not green enough. He added a whole new library wing hidden in the trees to the right, with special lighting and humidity and temperature controls. He replaced the upstairs windows with triple-pane low-emissivity ones made to match the first-floor windows he left in place because Mother wouldn’t give up the original wavy leaded glass despite how energy inefficient it is. He repaired the slate roof with new slates brought from the same quarry as the original roof, carefully cut to match the size gradations and color variations of the existing ones. He designed it all to be better while looking the same as it always has to anyone who hasn’t seen the cycle of neglect and rebirth. That’s the beauty of what Max does. His restoration work is a bit like well-done plastic surgery: things looks fresher in a way that leaves everyone marveling at how nothing has changed.
Nothing important has changed. The redwood floors inside still creak invitingly. The whole place still smells of dusty chintz, polished wood, Mother’s Chanel No. 5, and cigarettes. The chimney in the Captain’s Library still whistles on a windy night the way my great-grandfather wrote of in his journals, a low whistle that generations following him have come to call the Captain’s Ghost.
At least it did the last time I was here, before Mother died.
“It’s funny to think of this as your house now, Ginger,” Betts says, two small lines creasing between her brows. “It must feel so odd.”
I wonder, then, if Chawterley does still smell of Mother: her tobacco, her perfume, her shelves and shelves of unread books. I don’t know whether I want it to or not. It’s the way I feel whenever I go backwards: back home to Virginia before Mother sold the house; back to Ann Arbor; back to New York.
Max says, “I’m glad you’re here, even if just for the weekend, Ginge. It’s been bleak, looking out every night to see Chawterley gone dark.”
Gone dark. It’s an expression I’ve heard so often from Cook Islanders, but never about our house. We were always summer people until Mother moved here. Chawterley was always dark all winter. That never bothered islanders the way a house in town sitting vacant did. No one could see its lights anyway. We shared this end of the island with no one.
Now Max has a house here, too, on a one-acre lot Mother sold him not far from the no-name road. Mother never would have sold to anyone else; she didn’t sell for the money. My brother Beau approached Max, then suggested the idea to Mother, who’d been fond of Max even when he was just one of the many island kids we ran around with. It made Beau nervous to have Mother out here alone.
“Mother goes to all this trouble to make sure Max builds a house that she won’t even have to admit is there,” I tell Laney and Mia and Betts, “then asks him to leave a light on at night.”
“Just an eight-watt LED,” he says. “It’s not like she was asking me to drill in the Arctic Refuge to keep it lit.”
“What about the lighthouse?” Laney asks quietly, addressing Max as if she can bear to talk to him about this even if she can’t talk to us. “The lighthouse puts out a lot of light.”
“Built a new one down to town, where the ferry stops in,” Max says, the funny preposition choices identifying him as an island boy despite the many years he spent in New York. He alone looks north, to where the old lighthouse sits as silent and empty as Chawterley, its white shingle tower rising up to the red of the lantern deck and cupola, the lightless beacon. “The darkness out here’d make anybody lonely,” he says.
I turn my back to the lighthouse, looking down the marshy shoreline to Max’s house. I’ve never imagined Mother lonely out here. It’s hard to imagine Chawterley without a dozen Cooks and Conrads and Humphreys setting off to hunt in Goose Marsh or sail to Lightning Knot or stir up whatever trouble we could find in town. And Mother wasn’t a woman to be lonely. She didn’t indulge much in emotions that couldn’t be channeled into bettering the world.
Mia follows up on Max’s LED comment, the two of them launching into an enthusiastic discussion splattered with terms like “autoclaved aerated concrete,” Kirei Wheatboard, “passive solar gain.” Who knew postindustrial denim batt insulation (recycled blue jeans in the ceilings and walls) could be as sexy as unrecycled blue jeans falling away from bare hips? That’s where they’ll slip out of their blue jeans together, I think: at Max’s house, with the low-e glass sliders wide open to the water. Maybe on the sustainable bamboo floor. What would it be like to have sex on a bamboo floor? Or perhaps in the spa, in the glow of the LED landscape lighting, although fucking in water (even solar-heated water) isn’t as great as it sounds. So maybe on the spa’s wide stone edge, with their feet in the water to help keep them solar-heated, too.
I try to imagine Ted and me slipping out of our blue jeans on the stone coping of Max’s spa, with the waterfall splashing away from us, pouring toward the bay. Ted used to love to slip my blue jeans down my hips anywhere outdoors. Or slide his hands up under my skirt to find I wasn’t wearing underwear. He liked public places, with the risk of being caught, and so did I: the woods in Central Park in broad daylight; a conference table at the office late at night; a little alleyway in the East Village where, to be honest, a couple seen in the act probably wouldn’t have fazed anyone.
We have a spa in the backyard in Cleveland. No waterfall, but it is solar-heated, with a gas heater, too, because you can’t get to a hundred degrees on solar alone. We sometimes share a bottle of wine and a soak out there, but we always come inside to make love, if we make love at all. It’s one thing to have an adventurous lover in an anonymous city like New York, another entirely to have reckless public sex in a place where your fellow executives or churchgoers or co-presidents of the PTA might recognize you. Although Ted wouldn’t mind being caught in flagrante delicto himself. It’s the possibility of me being seen that gives him pause. Me, the mother of his children. So I guess the truth, or Ted’s truth, anyway, is that it’s one thing to have an adventurous lover, another entirely to have the woman who breastfed your son brought up on an indecency charge.
We’ve never even made love outside here on Cook Island, now that I think of it. I have: at Rogues’ Point, in the skiff in Hunters’ Gut and Little Thoroughfare and Kizzie’s Ditch, and the first time, at Fog’s Ghost Cove in bright moonlight, with no fog in which to hide. But whenever Ted and I have made love here on what he calls “Faith’s Island,” it’s always been in the old four-poster in Nana’s Room. Quietly, so no one would hear.
“Did you know that in Christian art, the peacock is a symbol of immortality?” I ask, half expecting Mia and Laney and Betts to roll their eyes. They just look at me like they understand exactly what I’m thinking. Only Max looks perplexed.
“Immortality and the incorruptible soul,” I say. “Flannery O’Connor raised them. Peacocks. She used to send feathers in her letters to friends. She once sent a five-foot-long one to Robert Lowell, after a particularly bad one of his ‘spells.’ ”
“That’s what this weekend is missing!” Betts says. “Imagine the trouble we could stir up with a supersized peacock feather or two.”
I smile even though I don’t feel like smiling, because I know she wants to make me smile. Heartbroken / But wearing / Fresh / Smiles, like Alice Walker’s friend arrives to visit her. It strikes me then that Laney and Betts and Mia haven’t been back here since that spring break, that this can’t be easy for them either. Laney looks a little green, and she doesn’t get seasick.
“Clearly you ought to be the poet here, Betts,” I say. “That was Lowell’s response, too: ‘That’s all I need, a peacock feather.’ ”
I look up at Mother’s empty house looming over us. “Well, I’m sorry to report there will be not one drop of tequila in the liquor cabinet, decent or rotgut,” I say. “Believe me, I’ve looked before.”
Laney
THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8
I’M FINE ENOUGH till I’m breathing in the stench of sea air and the grumble of bay water I see now I never have quite washed away. Ad undas. “To the waves,” literally, but what it really means is “to hell.”
I stand on the bird-dropping-splattered pier, trying to attend to what Ginger is saying about her mama’s peacock book. This is hard for her, too. But I can’t find my way beyond the smells and the looming red of the lighthouse, the birds squawking and trilling and something that sounds like a cross between laughter and barking. The joy of them seems worse than anything nasty could be, laughter at the edge of a newly dug grave. Although this particular grave isn’t new. This grave is peeking out from under decades of weedy underbrush.
It’s only three days, and Betts needs me. Surely I can tolerate three sunny autumn days with my dearest friends.
I try to focus on how much I did love this place those first days: the white houses at the public end of the island perched like lilies on
a soft summer pond; the boats arriving with their catch, all the men here crabbers; the children luring baitfish into mason jars with bits of bread and lines of string. I recall one mama crying out, “Run nor’east, honey!” to a girl with a kite who changed direction as if she were a compass. I almost wish Willie J and Manny and Gem and Joey were still little like that, still needing me to help them decide which way to run to catch the wind.
As the splattered purple-red berries on the path smush into the thin soles of my pumps, I try to find comfort in thoughts of my life now: William and the children and our home in Decatur, the many friends pitching in to help with my campaign. My own mama deserves the credit for my running for political office, or perhaps the word is blame, and Faith, too, played a role. But I’d be nowhere at all without friends. Even my first job in government came through a friend of Daddy’s from his Morehouse College days: Maynard Jackson, who was by then the first black mayor of Atlanta. After I’d graduated from Wellesley, not long after my parents moved to Atlanta, I found myself interviewing to work for a spell on Maynard’s reelection campaign.
I hadn’t been working but about a week when someone collected me to take me to Maynard’s office, and before I knew it I was following him to speeches and press conferences, in charge of his outreach to young voters. He took me under his wing the way a man does when he’s known your daddy since the two of them were eighteen. He urged me to apply to law school, and took me back into his fold three years later, when I just couldn’t go back to Tyler & McCoy.