Pug Hill (31 page)

After a few more minutes of being a modern-day Snow White, I get up and head to the kitchen. I walk in and see Mom, where I expected to see her, standing at the counter, chopping something. Mom, nine days out of ten, likes to spend a large portion of the day involved in food preparation. Should you question this, she will tell you it makes her very happy, and she will tell this to you in a way that says, really don’t question this again.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, and she puts down her knife and we hug and we kiss and she pulls away and studies me for just a second and says, “You’re looking well, Hope.”

What I actually hear is, “You’re hair looks frizzy and with everything colorists can do these days I don’t know why you insist on walking around with it red; have you switched foundations because I’m not sure the one you have on properly matches your skin tone; have you done something new with your eyebrows, dear?; and, I don’t see why you insist on wearing these camisole-type shirts out in public when a) they are not appropriate and b) no one ever said your arms were your best feature.”

I try to go back, to hear only, “You’re looking well, Hope,” but it’s impossible. When you live so much of your life really close to the bad place, it’s hard not to occasionally take quick trips back there.

“How’s everything?”

“Everything’s great,” I tell her, and ask, “Are you excited for your trip, for your party?”

“Oh, I am, it’s all very nice. And I appreciate it, that you’re here,” she tells me.

“My pleasure,” I say, and without even realizing that I’m doing it, I tuck my hair behind my ears.

“Don’t screw your hair behind your ears, Hope. It looks so unattractive that way,” she says, reaching forward and pulling my hair out from behind my ears for me. “Here let me show you,” she continues, but rather than actually tucking her own hair behind her ears to show me how much less attractive she feels one looks with their hair “screwed” behind their ears as opposed to not (which she has been known to do on numerous occasions) she turns instead to the kitchen counter, to show me something there.

“I’ve made lists, and I’ve separated Captain’s medicine into packets. One for each morning I’ll be gone, and one for each night. It’ll be easier for you and Dad this way. Dad will do the insulin shots, you don’t have to worry about that.”

Mom shows me her lists, her packets of medicine for Captain, shows me a chart she’s made where we can check off what medicine has been administered and when.

“Do you want me to show you how to put the pills in the cream cheese?” she asks.

“No, thanks,” I say, “I’m okay.”

We talk a little about how things are at the museum and how I’m fine with not getting the promotion, and how it hasn’t clouded everything else. We talk about her book club and what they’re reading, and the incident with the hair tucking is forgiven.

“Hope,” she says very seriously, “while I’m gone, please do not bring up the tent again to your father. Your father is very upset about the tent.”

“No, I won’t,” I say, and while part of me still wants to explain that I didn’t technically bring up the tent, right now, really, it’s better just to leave it. But for some reason, I feel compelled to ask instead, “Is Darcy sleeping in the tent, too?”

“Yes, I imagine she is.”

Clearly, this whole thing is terrible, because the tent will, of course, serve all next weekend as a blatant reminder of the commune that may very well be kicking up dust in the future.

“This REI, this was your idea, I understand?” she says.

“Uh, yes.”

“Well, you’re father is very upset. He went online and ordered up a tent from REI, and it’s in the garage in this very large box, you can go see it.”

“No,” I say, “that’s okay, I don’t want to see it.”

“Well apparently C.P. won’t sleep in an REI tent either. C.P. himself actually called up your father, he said to explain. He said he is trying to shun materialism and that sleeping in an L.L. Bean tent or an REI tent doesn’t jive with his beliefs.”

I am afraid, very afraid, that I’m going to start laughing. I focus all my attention on trying not to; I focus all my attention on trying my best just to listen.

“I swear to God your father had to just give me the phone. I just said, ‘Henry, just hand me the phone,’ because I think your father is about ready to kill C.P. and that won’t help anything,”

“No,” I say.

“I think the spa will help, do you think the spa will help?”

“I think the spa will help,” I say, even though, at this point, I’m not so sure.

My mother sighs. She walks over to the coffeepot, empties it and rinses it. I grab a dish towel and go stand next to her. She gives me the coffeepot to dry, and I return it to its place in the coffeemaker and go back to sit down on the stool. Mom heads immediately to the coffeemaker and lifts up the back of it, the part where you put the water in.

“It’s important to leave the back open for a while so the water can dry out properly,” she explains, “You don’t ever want to get mildew in your coffeemaker.”

“No,” I say, but in agreement, nodding my head as if no is yes and there’s really no difference between the two. As I do so, I realize that she’ll tell me things like this all the time, like how often one needs to bring their knives in for sharpening, or how to care for your coffeemaker, and it doesn’t matter in the least that I never cook in my apartment and that I rarely make coffee in it either. What matters the most I think is that she still wants to teach me things, even if sometimes those things might be that I’m not good at matching my foundation to my skin tone. All these little lessons, I think, as she spins the part of the coffeemaker that holds the filter out to dry, too. There’s something about these little lessons she’s always given. It’s these little pointers, I sometimes suspect, that keep everything in place.

I look at the coffeemaker and I think about this thing with Darcy, this worrying over her that my parents do. It has something to do, in a way, with leaving open a coffeemaker, and I understand the trip to Canyon Ranch a little more. I don’t know very much about being a parent, but from what I’ve learned from coffeemaker maintenance and from sisters, who after everything might go live in communes, I’m pretty sure a parent’s work might never have an end point.

“Caroline, Hope,” Dad says, walking into the kitchen with Captain at his heels, “we’d better get going.”

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“We’re going for a boat ride!” Dad says enthusiastically. “Didn’t I tell you last week we planned a boat ride?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“No, I’m sure I did,” he says, and I still don’t think so, but really why not just drop it?

“You’ll join us we hope?” Mom chimes in.

“Of course,” I say, and then she adds in, “The Gerards are coming, too.”

“Oh, no, why?” I ask. “I don’t like the Gerards.”

“Hope, don’t be intolerant,” my father says, because even though it’s completely unfounded, and in my opinion completely unjust, somehow in my family I have gotten the reputation of being intolerant. “I’ll go get Betsy’s life preserver,” Dad says, and then, “Five minutes?”

“Why are we going on a boat ride with the Gerards?” I ask as soon as Dad is out of earshot.

“I don’t know. Your father had to buy that Boston Whaler when no one wanted it and now it seems to make him happy to go on it, so we’re going.” It occurs to me that my question about the Gerards is not going to be answered.

“And anyway,” Mom adds on, “Betsy so enjoys it.” Betsy barks from the corner of the kitchen at the sound of my mother mentioning her name. Mom’s right, I mean she often is of course, but she’s right about Betsy. Betsy loves few things in this world as much as attention, a close second, however, is the wind.

I sigh and head upstairs to change.

I’m standing at the far end of the dock, watching as my mother approaches, carrying Betsy. Mom thinks Betsy doesn’t like to walk on the dock.

It’s windy out today, even windier down at the end of the dock. Betsy looks quite serious as she approaches. She’s often very serious about being carried, and also about being walked on a leash, two things you’d think, given her hyperactivity and propensity to screeching, would be put into use a bit more often than they actually are. Mom arrives at my side and puts Betsy down at our feet. We both shield our eyes at exactly the same time to look out at the harbor where Dad is rowing the dingy out to the moored Boston Whaler with Mr. Gerard, who now after thirty years I am supposed to call Walter. I almost always forget, something that doesn’t annoy Mr. Gerard nearly as much as it annoys Mrs. Gerard, and also makes me feel like I’m still fifteen.

We watch as they tie the dingy to the mooring and get up onto the Whaler, and then, at the same time, we both look down to check on Betsy.

“Hi, Bets,” I say.

The wind is making ripples in her fur and you can see this pleases her to no end by the way she throws her head back with abandon. She throws it back that same way when Mom gives her Lil’ Cesar’s dog food. Actually though, when I’d seen her do this once while eating Lil’ Cesar’s, I’d commented on it, how she throws her head back with abandon when she chews, and Mom had explained to me, very seriously, that she thought it wasn’t so much with abandon, as it was with joy. And actually, looking right now at Betsy, I think she’s right; I think it is much more with joy.

“When I give her Lil’ Cesar’s, she does that with her head, throws it back with joy that way,” Mom says, and sometimes it’s so scary, how much it seems at certain times like she can just read minds.

“I worry though,” she continues, “as much as she enjoys it, the Lil’ Cesar’s has so many chemicals in it. I don’t know why I ever started with it.”

And I say, “Uh-huh,” and then from the end of the dock I hear, “Yoo-Hoo!”—yes, really,
Yoo-Hoo—
as Mrs. Gerard, so tall and dark, approaches.

“Hi, Mrs. Gerard,” I say when she reaches us.

“Nancy!” she corrects me gruffly, and then tries to make it un-gruff by smiling a big smile at me.

“Nancy,” I repeat as she leans over and kisses me on one cheek, and then the other, and tells me, “I’m very European!”

I assume she means the kissing and I agree, and then she turns away from me and swoops in on my mother. I’m happy for that, I’m happy not to be the focus of Mrs. Gerard’s attention. I wonder though, somewhat nervously, how long can it possibly last?

Betsy starts barking again, until Mrs. Gerard looks down and tells her, “Yes, hello, Betsy. You are my best friend.”

I turn back to the water, shielding my eyes to see the Boston Whaler as it glides toward us. As we all get onto the boat and pass out life preservers and take our seats, I try, tremendously unsuccessfully, not to sit anywhere near Mrs. Gerard. Sadly, tragically really, if you ask me, as we take off into the harbor, I realize I have not been as vigilant as this day has been demanding that I be. I don’t quite know how it happened, but somehow I’m sitting right across from Mrs. Gerard. Mom is in the front V section of the boat with Betsy, who is ecstatic now, intermittently barking and gurgling and screeching, while still managing at the same time to bite at the wind.

“Now, now Betsy,” I hear Mom saying to her, accomplishing, it seems, nothing at all. Dad’s at the steering wheel, and Mr. Gerard is in the chair next to him, so not only am I right across from Mrs. Gerard, right there squarely in her conversational line of fire, there isn’t anyone else around to distract her. You might have noticed my dad telling me earlier in the kitchen not to be so intolerant, and you might be thinking right now that I’m being intolerant of Mrs. Gerard just because she says things like
Yoo-Hoo
and
Yodel-eh-hee-hoo
(she says that, too) and announces that she’s European when she double-cheek kisses you and worse than that, sometimes speaks in really poorly accented French. But it’s not just that. No, Mrs. Gerard is, far and away, not exactly one of my favorites, but not because of any of the previous (and in my mind perfectly legitimate) reasons.

See, Mrs. Gerard is obsessed, obsessed, with the fact that I am not yet married, with unearthing the mysteries of it, with trying tirelessly, endlessly to figure out
why.
And I can’t handle it, not from her; I mean, I do enough of it myself.

And just like that, as we begin to motor slowly out of the harbor, before the engines have gotten too loud to talk over, Mrs. Gerard turns to me, eager, and asks, “How’s Evan? Is Evan coming out next week for the party?” There is no escape, I take a deep breath, look back at her and start to say, “Oh, we br—”

“Now, which one is Evan?” Mr. Gerard pipes in before I can answer all the way, before I can explain that it’s really for the best. “It gets so hard to keep track, heh, heh.”

Heh, heh,
I think, and really, I’m about to jump in and explain that there is no longer any Evan, that really there never should have been any Evan, but then I hear the as-far-away-as-you-can-get-from-dulcet tones of Mrs. Gerard’s voice. “You know, Walter, you met him last Christmas at the McNeill’s? You remember.”

Mr. Gerard looks at her blankly.

“The one who looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo,” Mom shouts back from her perch at the front of the boat.

Why she feels that this is what she must add to the conversation is beyond me.
Thanks, Mom,
I think to myself, narrowing my eyes ever so slightly as I turn in her direction, wondering when it happened, when Evan managed to revert from schmuck, back to his previously revoked status as Jean-Paul Belmondo look-alike.

“Right, right,” says Mr. Gerard, nodding his head in thoughtful remembrance, “nice fellow, banker, right?”

“Well, he worked at a hedge fund, so it’s a little different,” I explain. I feel that speaking of him in the past tense is as good a place as any to start, and now, here’s my moment, I jump in before any more praises of Evan can be sung. “But we’re not dating anymore.”