My father made an Ingrid-y noise, pffff, blowing air out in a rush. “Hardly,” he said. “I wouldn’t be on the economics faculty if I were. Though,” he muttered, “there have been a few.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Gone. Purged.” He waved his hand at the rearview mirror.
“Mummy says you’re a communist.”
“It’s a family joke,” he said.
One more thing I wasn’t in on. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“It’s not that funny,” he said.
Labor Day weekend. The Bigelows were coming for dinner.
“I thought they were on the Cape,” I said to my mother.
“They decided to leave early, so as not to get stuck in the Monday-night traffic. And to see us.” She had a roast of beef in the oven and heaps of tomatoes and corn on the counter. The corn-water pot was boiling away. “Shuck these,” she said, jerking her elbow at the corn.
I liked shucking corn, because it was a permitted mess. I sat on the floor and spread the business section of The New York Times in front of me. The silk felt wet, though it wasn’t. Some ears peeled easily, and some I had to struggle with, but there was always one moment when the whole casing gave way and the bright, fresh kernels appeared, with their sweet vegetable smell. Something about corn was sad. Like the huge tomatoes, many so ripe they were splitting at the top, corn signaled the end of summer.
The doorbell rang before I’d finished shucking.
“Perfect timing,” said my mother. “We don’t want the corn to sit around and get old.”
The Bigelows hadn’t changed at all.
“How wonderful to see you again,” said A.A. “The travelers return.”
“We brought beach-plum jelly,” Ingrid said, “because we wanted to bring oysters but we were afraid they would die in the car.”
“Mama, you thought that. I told you just put them in a bucket of seawater,” Roger said.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” my mother said. “We want to start right in with the corn, unless”—she looked worried—“you’ve had it up to here with corn.”
“Never enough corn,” said A.A.
“You grew up,” Ingrid said to me. She scowled.
I could see that Roger wanted to hug me. He looked from side to side, he blinked, he looked at the floor. Then he walked over to me in a robotic shuffle and put his arms around me like pincers, his hands sticking straight out behind my back so as not to overdo the contact.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Have we got time for Campari and soda?” my father asked my mother.
“Sure. Why not? Campari and corn.” She slid the ears into the pot one by one. “How many minutes do you do?” she asked Ingrid.
“Two after the boil.”
“We had roast corn on the beach,” Roger said. “You roast it in the shell.”
My father said, “It’s called a husk.”
“Hey!” said Roger. “I learned the longest word in the English language. Do you want to know what it is?”
I nodded. It was cozy to be with Roger again.
My father opened his mouth to say the word, and my mother poked him with her wooden spoon. “Wait,” she whispered.
“Okay.” Roger drew a breath. “Antidisestablishmentarianism.”
“But do you know what it means?” my father asked him.
“Something about church?” Roger hunched his shoulders.
Before my father could correct and expand on that, my mother said, “You have to pick up the pot and drain it because I can’t lift it.”
It was time to eat. “Each person take one thing to the table,” my mother said. She handed the heavy, steaming dish of corn to my father and picked up the roast, oozing on its wooden board. A.A. took the tomatoes in oil with red onions cut paper-thin. Ingrid took the bowl of horseradish mixed with sour cream to put on the slices of beef. I took the wicker basket of hot little rolls cut from a tube of dough that lived in the freezer (“pretty good for premade,” according to my mother), and Roger took the virgin log of butter on the yellow plate from Italy. My father zipped back into the kitchen to put all the drinks on a tray and carry them in too.
“Now,” said A.A., “tell us everything. I could see from your letters, Annette, that the luxurious life was a bit of a strain.”
“I guess I’d rather make my own dinner,” she said.
“Why not, if you can cook like this,” said A.A.
My mother was pleased.
“The entire Doxiadis operation turned out to be a boondoggle,” my father said. “Doxiadis has a theory he calls Ekistics. The science of human habitation.” He fluttered his hand above his head. “It’s all up in the clouds. As far as I could see, everyone there was his nephew or his cousin or his pal from the Resistance, and they spent a lot of time in cafés spinning out no-hope plans for cities they wanted to create on the southern coast of Greece. Nobody in the government paid any attention to them. It was extremely frustrating.”
“Must have been,” A.A. murmured.
“They’re in terrible shape,” my father went on. “The economy is a shambles. Well, the whole place is a shambles. For instance, there isn’t even one traffic light in Athens. They’re heading for either a Communist takeover, which won’t help, or a military coup, which will make things worse. The last thing on their minds is urban planning—which I can understand. They’ve got more important problems. Everybody’s suspicious of everybody else, What did your uncle do during the war sort of thing, and they’re all scraping along at a subsistence level.”
“Or at a nonsubsistence level,” my mother put in. “They’re living on potatoes and nettles.”
“We never ate any nettles,” I said.
“We did,” my mother said. “We ate them in a taverna on Crete.”
“You know, we used to eat nettles in Sweden. They were a special spring treat,” Ingrid said.
“Don’t they sting?” I asked.
“Uncooked,” said Ingrid. “Cooked, no.”
“Nettles stinging your tongue,” Roger said with an appreciative shudder.
“But they don’t!” Ingrid said in her screechy, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about voice. “I explained!”
My father wanted to quash the nettle digression. “Where they’d be without the Marshall Plan is anybody’s guess if this is where they are with it.”
“So for you,” A.A. said, “it must have been a disappointment. All the trouble of moving abroad and then not finding any way to help. Especially since they’d been so eager.”
“Well, they were deluded,” my father said. “Doxiadis had some fantasy that an economics professor from Harvard could solve everything.”
“That you could,” A.A. said.
My father said, “A professor from Podunk Technical College could have not helped them just as well as I did. Or didn’t.”
“But without the cachet,” my mother said.
“Still,” A.A. said. “To see Knossos, to see Delphi and Olympus …”
“We never got to Olympus,” said my mother. “Anyhow, it’s just a mountain.”
“You really didn’t like it there,” said Ingrid.
“But it is fantastic,” said my father. “It’s—I can’t describe it. To be sitting in the theater at Epidaurus, where Sophocles was first performed. Your head spins.”
“Because it’s too hot and there’s nowhere to eat, so you’re running low on potatoes,” my mother said.
“Annette!” My father was shocked.
“Okay, I’m exaggerating,” my mother admitted. “Delphi was particularly lovely. And you do have that strange sensation of the centuries rolling back.”
I stared at her. She’d had that feeling too?
“Maybe next year, instead of Wellfleet, we’ll go,” A.A. said to Ingrid.
“Kind of expensive,” said Ingrid.
“What do you think, Roger?” A.A. asked.
“Yo
u said we were going to Kitty Hawk, to see the airplane things,” said Roger.
“You should have come to visit while we were there,” my mother said. “We had two hundred extra bedrooms.”
My father made a face. He didn’t like my mother’s overstatements.
“But what was the problem?” Ingrid asked my mother.
“I think it was living in Athens,” she said. “It’s a hideous city, dirty, sprawling, disorganized.”
“Needs a dose of Ekistics, bad,” said my father.
“It needs something, all right.” My mother shook her head. “It might be the contrast, because the landscape of Attica is so beautiful. The sea and sky and the rocks are all unchanged, of course. Then in the middle of it, this blot. You keep pinching yourself, I’m in Athens! But to believe it, you have to be an epigrapher and an archaeologist and to know the plays and Thucydides and Pausanius, and if you aren’t a good enough historian, which I’m not, you feel guilty all the time—you feel you’re wasting an opportunity. And you are. Maybe my imagination wasn’t up to it. I just couldn’t see past the mess of the present.”
“You had to do a kind of mental excavation every day to appreciate it—is that what you mean?” asked A.A.
My mother nodded. “Yes, otherwise you get stuck in the difficulties of daily life, and there are plenty of those. No food in the markets, repairmen are three days late, everybody lies all the time. About everything.”
“Almost everything,” my father said.
“Think of one instance when they didn’t lie. You can’t!”
“George didn’t lie,” my father said.
“He lied constantly!” My mother was getting mad. “It’s a two-hour trip. No, it isn’t—it’s a four-hour trip. The boat will stop for two days in Crete. But it doesn’t; it stays for half a day. The owner of this restaurant will give us a discount. But no, he won’t, or he’s not the owner anymore. It’s reflexive, perpetual, needless lying.”
“They want to please,” my father said. “They tell you what you want to hear.”
“I want to hear the truth,” my mother said. She stood up. “Chocolate roll, anyone?”
“You made chocolate roll?” My father was surprised and delighted.
“Why not,” my mother said. “It’s a celebration to be home and to be eating with the Bigelows.”
“We’re glad you’re back too,” Ingrid said. “But not as glad as you are, I see.”
Sometimes I couldn’t understand what Ingrid meant. Wasn’t she happy to see us? A.A. and Roger seemed really pleased. Maybe she didn’t like us—me, in particular. Maybe she’d enjoyed having a year off from including me at dinner several times a week and contending with the messes Roger and I made together.
I looked over at Roger, who was sitting across from me. His head was still too big for the rest of him. I wondered if he was ever going to grow into it.
My mother pointed at the plates, and I got up to clear the table. A.A. got up too.
“No, no,” my mother said. “She can do it.”
For a moment, I missed Greece, where Kula had done all the chores I had to do at home. But I didn’t want to be back there. I wanted to be in a place where I could be happy, and that wasn’t Greece. It didn’t seem to be Cambridge anymore either. Once, though, it had been. Hadn’t it been?
I cleared the table. I tipped the corncobs into the trash. I stacked the dishes beside the sink the way my mother liked. When I went back to the table, Roger was talking about how great seventh grade was going to be. “It’s the Civil War and all those battles.”
I sat there eating chocolate roll while my father and A.A. discussed the chances of Senator Kennedy’s becoming president. A.A. thought it was likely.
My father didn’t. “Nixon’s such a car salesman, he’ll convince the whole country that if they don’t elect him, the Soviets are going to drop a bomb on us. And everybody knows his name. Nobody knows a thing about Jack Kennedy.”
“Everybody knows that Nixon is a snake,” my mother said.
My father jerked his chin up in the Greek gesture of dismissal he’d adopted.
“We might be ready for a turn to the left,” said A.A. “And he’s so young and charming. That helps.”
“At least he’s got your vote,” my father said.
“I wish I could vote for Norman Thomas the way I used to,” said A.A. “Maybe I’ll write him in.”
My mother smiled. “My mother would have loved you,” she said to A.A. “Did you know that she ran for mayor of Philadelphia on the Socialist ticket?”
“Really! How did she do?” A.A. asked.
“About as well as Norman Thomas,” said my mother.
My mother loaded the dishwasher while my father wrapped the remains of the roast in aluminum foil and slid the tomatoes into a smaller bowl.
“Now I feel we’re really home,” said my mother. “Having a dinner like that.”
“Yes,” said my father. “I guess I’d better look in on the office on Monday.”
“I wish you would cut the grass in back,” said my mother. “Monday’s a holiday.”
“Even better. Nobody will bother me,” my father said. “I’m sure there’s a huge pile of mail.”
“Inviting you to conferences that happened in February,” my mother said. “You could cut it tomorrow.”
“Can we get another cat?” I asked.
“Oh, god,” said my father.
“What do you care?” my mother said to him. “It’s not like it’s a dog you have to walk.”
“They’re always underfoot,” he said.
I opened the back door and went into the yard.
It was a sea of tall grass topped with tiny wheat ears of seed. Stars and mosquitoes and fireflies and fast-chirping crickets. The night was very dark and warm and big.
I stood knee-deep in the dewy stalks and I felt as big as the night. I had a booming, echoing feeling in my chest, a throbby sort of feeling, as if I had lost something wonderful. My childhood—it was gone!
But it hadn’t been wonderful.
This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. I could revise the empty space inside me so that it had a better shape: the outline of a happy childhood.
A Note About the Author
Susanna Kaysen has written the novels Asa, As I Knew Him and Far Afield, and the memoirs Girl, Interrupted and The Camera My Mother Gave Me. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Other titles by Susanna Kaysen available in eBook format
Asa, As I Knew Him • 978-0-307-51354-0
The Camera My Mother Gave Me • 978-0-375-41424-4
Far Afield • 978-0-804-15107-8
Girl, Interrupted • 978-0-804-15111-5
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY SUSANNA KAYSEN
The Camera My Mother Gave Me
Girl, Interrupted
Far Afield
Asa, As I Knew Him
Susanna Kaysen, Cambridge
(Series: # )
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