Jasper was the one to help Kit with his homework, to make sure he did his chores: setting the table; feeding Jasper’s large, bearlike dogs (two huskies and a malamute); filling the bird feeders surrounding the house. Jasper was also the one to drive the three boys into the village, where Kit and Kyle attended the elementary school and Rory caught a bus to the regional high school. For the entire summer after the wedding, Kit had feared the change of schools—but Jasper’s small-town fame bestowed a certain stature on Kit as well. After taking attendance for the first time, his fourth-grade teacher announced that the new pupil among them had the grand privilege of living with Ski Bum Number One. For an instant, the laughter was terrifying—until Kit saw the looks they’d turned in his direction. Nearly all his classmates skied; nearly all had been taught by Jasper, who, in the eyes of the town’s youth, was kin to Daniel Boone.
On the three weeknights when Kit’s mother made it back in time for dinner, she was worn out. The return route took her nearly due west the whole way, so in the warm months she had to drive straight toward the sinking sun. In the cold months, when it was dark by four-thirty, the final stretch of road, winding into the mountains, was often slick with ice. She was elated to reach home. She would hug Jasper and Kit before so much as setting down her satchel with its freight of rosters, songbooks, and stray recorders. Monday through Friday, Jasper made dinner. His meals were plainer than the ones Kit’s mother made, and vegetables were scarce. “A man cooks as a man likes to eat,” he declared when she wondered aloud whether all the broccoli, peas, and beans in the world had withered away. The next night, he served beans from a can.
It took Kit a few months to notice how much less frequently his mother played her cello, the instrument he thought of as her other
child: mute, undemanding, assured of her devotion. The way she leaned in so attentively as she played, the way she nearly cradled its robust yet fragile body, looked so much like the physical affection she gave to Kit as well. He saw this, from an early age, as a source of comfort, not envy, a broader canvas for his mother’s intent, expressive love.
When she and Kit had lived together, just the two of them, she often played after putting him to bed; three or four afternoons a week, she also gave lessons. Once, after he watched her play, alone, for some time, she told him that the cello was a way of bringing happiness into her life every single day. “Happiness doesn’t come easily, just because you want or even deserve it,” she said. “I don’t think you’re too young to know that. So you’ve got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.”
On the occasions she did take out her cello, its solemn voice filled the lofty reaches of Jasper’s house much the way it had filled Nana’s church when she played for Uncle Andrew’s wedding. He wondered what it meant that his mother did not play as much as she used to, but maybe this wasn’t cause for worry. Maybe what it meant was that now happiness
did
come easily to her. Now she had Jasper to love, as well as Kit. She was busier; she was less lonely.
But by the time Kit entered high school—Rory gone off to college, Kyle soon to follow—he began to perceive his mother’s life, nine months of the year, as an emotional balancing act between gratitude and fatigue. Her laughter seemed less spontaneous, more like a performance. Summer was her season of renewal, a season of long mornings savored in bed, meals and baths taken slowly, afternoons spent gardening and cooking. She baked elaborate pies and cakes until the heat of July suffused even the cellarlike shade at the base of the house, forcing her to abandon the oven.
Yet even then, on the long days she could fill as she wished, she rarely played her cello. And after the first two or three summers, when she had gladly followed Jasper on the group hikes he led through the mountains, she stayed home, reading in the hammock on the deck or playing cards with Kit when he returned from day camp.
She did play music on the stereo—not just the classical pieces she knew so well as a musician but jazz and rock and newer, stranger kinds of music: Kit would always remember the first time he heard reggae, when his mother brought home
The Harder They Come
, and the day she put on Talking Heads, an album one of her students let her borrow. Though she could listen to Bach or Debussy for hours on end, still as a stone, face peaceful, eyes closed, fingers flickering on her lap, the class she loved teaching best was The Modern Song, one of those electives so popular at her school that only the oldest, smartest students made the cut. Each year, for the fall semester, she chose ten songs for these students to interpret and compare; each year, the selection changed. In the months leading up to the school year, she would listen closely to a few dozen songs, over and over, to decide which ones were worthy. She chose classics, like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want,” Hendrix singing “All Along the Watchtower,” Dylan singing “Tangled Up in Blue.” Most of the time, she included something by the Beatles or the Stones, by the Dead or Pink Floyd, by Patsy Cline or Elvis; but she’d be sure to throw in songs or performers that no teenager in rural New England in the 1970s or ’80s would know: Jack Teagarden, Johnny Hartman, Bob Wills, Tom Waits, Cole Porter singing obscure Cole Porter, Björk before she’d worn a stuffed swan to the Oscars.
Sometimes Kit’s mother drove the household crazy; Jasper said it was like living with an amateur deejay: “Almost as bad as a one-legged dancer.”
She let the rest of them make suggestions. One time, Jasper hauled a box from the back of a closet: it contained the records his first wife had banished from their mingled collection. Eagerly, Kit’s mother flipped through them, pulling out a dozen or more. “God, I forgot about Jefferson Airplane,” she said. “Who could forget about Jefferson Airplane?”
She slid the record from its brittle paper sleeve, tipped it toward the light to look for scratches, and placed it on the turntable. She leaned close, aiming the needle at a particular song; as soon as it began, she sang along with a passionate abandon that made the rest of them laugh. She altered her tone to emulate the lead singer, a woman with a voice as hard as flint, sparking with rage.
Kit had heard the song before, probably on the car radio, but he hadn’t liked the aggression of the singer’s voice. It was the voice of a woman trying to be a man. But as he listened to his mother sing the song, he heard more than bitterness and anger, or even the vehement longing to be loved; he heard a strange, almost vengeful threat in the words.
Don’t you want somebody to love?
…
You better find somebody to love
.
So what if you didn’t? What then?
His mother raised the needle from the record when the song was over. She was out of breath from trying to match the emotion. “Grace Slick,” she said.
Jasper’s smile was sly. “I remember
that
summer, Lordy do I ever. I did not behave my age. Vivian almost left me.”
Kit’s mother returned his smile, but then she looked away. “I remember it, too.” She pushed the box toward him and said, “You choose something. Something I wouldn’t expect from you.”
“Jefferson
Airplane
,” sighed Jasper, shaking his head, looking pleased.
“Something else,” said Kit’s mother. “Play me something else. From another summer. No more summer of
love
, please.”
At three in the morning, he takes off his shoes and walks upstairs in his bare feet. Sandra’s sleep, unlike her conviction, is fragile.
Without brushing his teeth or undressing, Kit slips into Will’s room. Will, like his father, could sleep through a tornado. On the lower bunk, Kit shoves aside the stuffed animals gathered there in a sort of purgatory: too babyish to rank as sleeping companions yet spared, so far, from a box in the attic. A snowy owl, a parasaurolophus, Maurice Sendak’s Max, SpongeBob, and half a dozen of the amoebalike creatures known as Uglydolls. How much more specific and peculiar are the stuffed animals modern children collect than the ones Kit owned (generic bear, generic horse, generic mouse). “Over, Uglies,” whispers Kit as he pulls a fleece blanket out from under the menagerie, spilling several plush totemic beings onto the floor.
He lies down and pulls the blanket over his shoulder; still he shivers. To save money on heat (telling the children they are living
greener lives), Kit sets the thermostat to sixty-five by day, fifty-five by night. In two and a half hours, the furnace will grumble back to life, begrudging them those ten degrees. Fanny complains that she can’t dress “like a girl” in a house this cold.
It is entirely Kit’s fault that he lost his job—or, really, failed to keep it. His students showered him with praise on their teacher evaluation forms (making him vulnerably smug), but he did not meet the deadline for his manuscript, the fattened-calf version of his Ph.D. thesis on the use of antlers in Inuit sculpture. He had collected permissions for all the illustrations—the art in the book would have been glorious—but he felt as if he’d said all he really wanted to say on this subject. What he wishes, in retrospect, is that he had taken what his colleagues (some condescendingly) would have called a “folkloric” approach, collecting stories along with the images. Bringing a culture’s oral and visual customs together is all the academic rage. By nature, Kit scorns anything remotely fashionable—but to what end? Purity? Integrity? Look at him.
Kit met Sandra on what he now thinks of as his youthful “driveabout.” He had stopped in Churchill to see the Eskimo Museum. The otherwise forlorn-looking town was crowded with tourists, yet the museum was virtually empty. For most of their time in the galleries, Kit and Sandra were the only visitors. Finally, they looked at each other and laughed. “Where is everybody?” said Kit.
“Bird-watching,” said Sandra. “Or beluga watching.”
“But not you.”
“And obviously not you.”
“I guess we don’t give a hoot about the wildlife.” It surprised him, how quickly he was flirting.
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m just taking a break from the sun.”
Over dinner, Sandra told him that she was from Eugene. Friends of her parents who were moving had paid her to drive their second car to Montreal. She had decided to “see a bit of the way-up-north” on her trip home, a relay of bus and train. “What would ever bring me here again?”
Kit told her he would be driving even farther north. He had a list of artists’ cooperatives, craft galleries, places to see the art he was
writing about. They hadn’t finished their main course when Sandra said, “Need a navigator? Hire me on spec. Free, I mean. You can boot me out anywhere.”
“Deal,” he said, then realized she wasn’t joking. He also realized that she had mistaken him for a genuine adventurer. He wished it were true.
Tall and wide-boned, her limbs long, her feet large, Sandra made the rental car seem even more compact. Her knees nearly met the dashboard, and her voluminous hair clung to the fabric lining the roof. Within a week, they were sharing not just a car, and then a room, but a bed. How strange it felt to become lovers in a place where the sun shone through most of the night. “Do you think too long a period of nightlessness,” mused Sandra, “could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?”
He objected, though of course he was flattered, when she called him “an academic Kerouac.” He did like driving through the wilderness, through the brief, bright flowering of the tundra. The monotony of these spaces did not put him off, nor the hardscrabble roads, but when it came to striking up a conversation with the artists he met, asking them to talk about their work, he turned shy and formal. He learned little beyond what he needed to know.
Kit had no clue how to ask the startling question that would yield the unexpected revelation. He would never have made a good collector of folklore. He didn’t have that investigative edge, what an anthro professor in college dubbed “intercultural moxie.” Art history, he claimed, was where you belong if, despite a yearning for “the other,” you lack the requisite shamelessness for probing into things like the sex lives of strangers. True to such predictions, that’s where Kit ended up. Or thought he ended up.
If he’d had a “real” father from the very beginning, Kit sometimes wonders—though casually, not as part of some existential crisis—would he have been discouraged from pursuing such an impractical, vaguely effeminate path? Would such a path never even have occurred to him? Would he have hung out more often in locker rooms, developed ambitions for scoring goals, winning contests, closing deals, finding work where adrenaline mattered?
He doesn’t even ski anymore. He could have blamed this on the job he landed—though blame of any kind was moot, back then, in
the face of his good fortune. Emerging from the perpetual gridlock of too many smart young scholars, he landed a tenure-track position not just anywhere but at a college within view of the Manhattan skyline. From their house in suburban New Jersey, you can drive for a weekend to Vermont, even the baby mountains of the Berkshires; but life became too homebound once the twins arrived—even before the twins arrived, when he and Sandra found themselves tethered to the cycling of hormones, natural and then induced.
Not long ago, they would remind each other how lucky they were. Sandra still misses the latter-day hippies of Eugene, where her father owns a nursery. (Until a few years ago, when he finally understood how settled they were, he hoped that she would come home to run the business once he retired.) But she found a part-time job at a fancy nursery in Saddle River. After giving up on trying to get pregnant the “normal” way—she began to bracket the word with her fingers, in fond imitation of their fertility doctor—she decided that the logical, backhanded antidote to entering the IVF gauntlet was a return to nature, if only in the form of landscape architecture courses. By the time she was solidly pregnant, Sandra had a master’s degree. “Talk about silver linings,” she said. Kit had never seen her so happy.