All the Houses (13 page)

“Now you all are treating me like a damn geezer. Sit down, sit down, sit down. I prefer to stand, thank you.”

“Okay, stand,” Maggie said.

“Team, I stand with you!” Hugo announced. Then he marched over and stood right next to Dad, as though they both were presenting themselves to a superior officer. Our father, who was still getting used to Hugo, made a
hmm-hmm
noise and sat down.

*   *   *

I'd spoken too soon about a salad. We had none of the relevant vegetables. The best I could come up with were a few oranges, a red onion, an ancient can of hearts of palm—I found
Use by 09/97
printed on the bottom and threw it out—and a jar of peanuts. I started to peel and chop the oranges and the onion, while the conversation in the other room floated by. After a minute Courtney came in, opened the refrigerator, and seemed to ask the refrigerator how it was doing.

“All right,” I said.

“Is there any more wine?” she called to the living room.

“What?”

Courtney yelled her question more loudly.

Dad said, “What?” again, and Maggie told him, and he said, “More wine?” and Maggie said, “Is there any,” and Dad said, “I don't think so”—and then I could hear Hugo trying to convince him he didn't need to go out and buy more wine, which only convinced him that he should do it, until Maggie cut in and said that she and Hugo would go, if any place was open they would go.

“Maggie looks skinny, doesn't she?” Courtney said.

“She's always been skinny.”

“Yeah, but did you see how loose her pants are? Do you think it's the Lexapro?”

“She's taking Lexapro?”

“But I always get fatter on SSRIs.”

Courtney had lost weight before her wedding a year earlier, then put it all back on again, with interest. Her body had become bulky in the middle, but not at the extremities, which were delicate and carefully adorned; she had the designer shoes, the gold dewdrops in her earlobes. She seemed to me like someone who'd grown up wealthy—not that we had ever wanted for anything when we were kids, but there was a difference between that and really rich, as I'd learned at college, where I met that second type of person, whom Courtney now resembled. The rings on her fingers, the scarf around her neck. An airiness to her voice now, one that hadn't been there when we were teenagers. It was as if all throughout our childhood she'd been leading a secret moneyed life.

“You're not putting those nuts in there, are you?” she asked.

I had poured a little mound of peanuts onto the cutting board. I looked them over. “There wasn't a lot to work with. Dill pickles are also an option.”

She picked up the peanut jar and held it away from her body. “They dump these chemicals on before they roast them.”

“You mean like salt?”

“I'm serious.”

“I'll put them on the side,” I said. “In a separate dish.”

“Thanks.”

As a teenage jock Courtney had been mischievous, at least some of the time. She'd also been repeatedly disappointed, for though she had tried again and again to elbow her way to the top, she had always landed in the number two or three slot, third in her class, second in the voting for lacrosse team captain. Each near miss had prompted nonchalance in public, tears at home, and a redoubling of her efforts. I think it had always confused her that I didn't have the kinds of ambitions she had, though if she'd ever had the chance to observe herself from the outside, if she could've seen how miserable her perfectionist tendencies had made her, then maybe she would've understood. Besides, I did nurse some ambitions of my own, just ones that she didn't recognize as such. They were unwieldy ambitions, and I downplayed them, even as I conducted clandestine operations on their behalf.

“How's that new job going,” she asked, and I told her about it. She stared at me, no doubt wondering at the fact that I was being paid to do such things, and impulsively I told her I had another project on my proverbial plate, something that had started out as a screenplay but that I was now attempting to turn into prose.

“Prose—”

“A prose narrative,” I said.

“A
prose narrative
?”

I'd bought myself a notebook, and I'd started to write sketches, partial scenes, much of it crossed out the next day. So far I hadn't told anyone what I was up to, nor could I have told them exactly. I certainly didn't want to call it a novel. An Iran-Contra novel was worse than an Iran-Contra feature film, and only an Iran-Contra epic poem or maybe an Iran-Contra operetta would have been less promising.

“Like a book,” I said.

“About?”

“Iran-Contra.”

“Seriously.”

“What happened to Dad, his whole story. And I also would want to include what we went through, that whole thing of growing up here.”

Once I'd started thinking about Dad and Dick Mitchell, I'd found myself remembering other times I'd seen them together, mainly at the parties my parents used to have, and then I was remembering myself at those parties. I wanted to bring in those memories also, even though my notions of Dad's past and my own didn't seem entirely compatible. I didn't know whether I was aiming for one book or two.

“You wrote a screenplay about all that?”

“The screenplay was more limited to the political side, but now I'm expanding on it.”

“I think we had a good childhood.”

“I didn't say we didn't.”

“You've implied it plenty of times, and now it sounds to me like you're writing this book about ‘what we went through.' You say it in a certain tone of voice. When I think of growing up, I think about us playing in the snow, going to school, swimming. We had our own pool! We were lucky.”

“Sure, but—”

“We had it pretty good, I think. No one's going to feel sorry for us.”

“I'm not saying they should.”

“We had it good, even if Dad effed things up,” she said.

“I don't know—”

“He totally did. But whatever. The pity party ended a long time ago.”

“It's not—”

“I mean, get a grip. We're adults now.”

This sounded like something she was in the habit of saying to herself:
get a grip.

“Speak for yourself.” I meant that as a joke, but she didn't respond.

“Anyway, we should do something, you and me,” she said.

“Sure, let's go out,” I said, but she had another idea. She said she'd organized a blood drive at her office but had been sick that day, and so she was planning to go give blood the Saturday after this one. Why didn't I come with her? We could have lunch afterward.

This was another of Courtney's compulsions, one she'd inherited from our mom, who'd worked for many years as head of development for the American Red Cross. I glanced at my salad. “You okay with oranges and onions? They might have been sprayed with something, you know, more chemicals.”

She grabbed a section of orange and put it in her mouth, then made a stricken, bulging face as if she'd been poisoned. I made a face back at her. Then she told me there was someone at her office she wanted to set me up with, a guy named Brandon or Brad or Brent, some name I didn't find so promising, but it was less the name than the fact that my sister, though she'd married a man from Mexico, would try to nudge me toward the Waspiest of guys. I'd thought I might tell her about Rob at some point, but I held back. Before, it hadn't seemed so significant to sleep with someone she'd dated years and years ago, but maybe I'd just been telling myself that, to give my wants the go-ahead.

*   *   *

Just as we were finishing dinner, Mom called from Philadelphia, and we passed the phone around and took turns having the same brief back-and-forth. She was calling from a friend's house, and I could hear festive noises in the background, a man's deep laughter, the clank and echo of somebody's good china, good silver. My mother was having a lively meal with friends while we were eating microwaved things from a deli case, which, in a way, we were doing for her benefit, so that Dad could tell her we were having Thanksgiving at home. I didn't say much before handing the phone to Maggie. Anyway the connection was poor. When Dad took the phone, he kept asking, “What?” and “Say again?” And then he told her, “Oh, we're having a fine time here.” There was a gentle quality to his voice that I'd never heard him use with her when they were married, and now it bothered me to hear it. He didn't mention his overnight stay in the hospital.

We hung up, and then Courtney announced that she and Hugo had to get going.

“It's only quarter past nine,” I said.

“I'm on an early schedule these days.”

I wished she would stay a little longer, if only to please Dad, but she left all the same. Afterward he went into the kitchen for something, and Maggie and I nestled into the couch and finished off the wine.

“They should have a kid,” I said. “We'll be maiden aunts.”

Maggie winced at that, then rallied. “Speak for yourself. I want to be a dowager,” she said.

“What is a dowager again?”

Dad had come up behind us, unnoticed until he protested, “You two ought to be a little less worried about your sister and a little more worried about yourselves.”

“Dad!” I said.

“I'm serious,” he said.

Only with a couple of glasses of wine in him would he say even that much, but I knew that what he wanted, maybe what he desired most of all in this world, hell-pitched handbasket though it might be, was that his daughters marry and procreate. Now, under the influence, he began to deploy some of his old diplomacy—or a more erratic and wheedling variation of it.

“Did you watch the news last night?” he started. “That accident in Herndon?” A kid had been stranded for hours in the back of a pickup truck, and as if that very kid were the grandchild we'd so far denied him, he began to talk about auto safety.

“What does that have to do with us dating?” Maggie asked.

“This is not about dating!” Dad said. “This is about people out there just driving around and hoping for the best! They are not prepared. Do either of you even know how to change a tire?”

“You get out of the car,” Maggie said, “and wait for someone to stop and help you.”

“What if there is nobody, what if you're out in the middle of nowhere?”

“I live in New York City. I don't even own a car.”

“I left mine in L.A.”

He looked to the ceiling in exasperation. What is to be done? That was his question. He had gone by the book, followed proper procedure, or mostly he had, and the rest of us had not held up our end of the bargain. The rest of the planet had not. Nobody was going to come help us change the tire.

And that was how we found ourselves standing in the driveway, watching Dad jack up the Camry. He marched us out into the mist-marbled night and went to work, while Maggie and I stood behind him, still holding our wineglasses. It was the same inscrutable demonstration he'd given each of us when we turned sixteen, in which he kept his back to us and didn't explain what he was doing, only this time it was late and it was cold and he was having trouble with the job. Periodically he would mutter “Hold on” or “Now watch” or “You see?” All I saw was Dad fumbling with the tools, the three of us washed up on the small island of artificial illumination created by the driveway security light, which on its own was insufficient for the task at hand, since its beam didn't quite reach the side of the car where Dad was squatting. Maggie offered to hold the flashlight, but before he passed it over he felt compelled to demonstrate how to turn it off and on, even though it was already on, and a young child could have figured out how to press its big orange button. Once he'd turned it off, though, it wouldn't come back on, much as he pressed the button and shook the flashlight and said “Give me a break.”

So we retreated inside to refill our glasses and look for batteries, and I went upstairs to use the bathroom, or so I said. Really it was just to hide out for a minute or two.

*   *   *

In my room I fell on the bed, then lay across its width, my head hanging over the side. I wriggled backward, so that more and more of my upper body was hanging off the edge, and my entire trunk was stretched out, a position I used to put myself in, it now came back to me viscerally, when I was twelve and thirteen. I used to
read
like that, for the sheer pleasure of being upside down, a pleasure that was inaccessible to me nowadays—now what I felt was the blood rushing to my face and my nose starting to itch—but that had to do with feeling disoriented and dizzy but safe at the same time. After half a minute I rolled over, in flailing-porpoise fashion, until I was hanging over the bed facedown and could see underneath it. I hung there with the side of the bed pressing into my stomach. I was a bit drunk, I noted. I took in the usual cobwebs and obligatory stray sock—how long had it been there?—which I pulled out and did not recognize.

And in retrieving that mossy old sock I realized I'd been reaching for my diary, one of the diaries that I'd kept irregularly in high school and stowed under my bed. I didn't know what had become of them, they were in a box someplace, but I could picture my old handwriting and the embarrassing lists, of foods I'd eaten and boys I liked and resolutions to self-improve, to work harder, to be kinder.

Back then I'd had an imaginary person whom I tried to emulate. Not an imaginary friend, exactly, because she was always ahead of me, rounding a bend, slipping out of sight, but an imaginary double. The person I should have been, if I'd been better. She was a more sparkling Helen, thinner, blonder, taller, free of Courtney's shadow. I'd thought of her as my idol, my goal, Platonic Helen, though as I recalled her for the first time in years, she seemed less like any version of myself and more like the generic blond popular girls I'd had little in common with, her elusive image just another tool I used to undercut myself.