Shelter in Place (2 page)

Our mother, who was going heavy on the champagne, stood up towards the end of the evening. She was wearing a fringed wool poncho, red as fresh blood. She'd bought it many years before on a trip to Guatemala, a rare romantic vacation with my father. Claire recoiled the way she always did when my mother made herself—intentionally or inadvertently, it didn't matter—the center of attention.

“What I'd like to say,” she said in her voice always too loud for the room, “is that I'm proud of my son. My son stepping into the wide world just like his big sister did.”

Here she raised her glass, drawing the poncho up to the right, forming a stunted woven wing and revealing a flash of red satin bra. Claire, cool in some trim black dress, red lipstick, hair drawn back tight to her skull like those women in that Robert Palmer video, winced.

“First to my daughter.” Now she raised the glass high enough to break the wing and reveal a spray of brown armpit hair. My father and I laughed and raised our own glasses, but Claire only gave a tight smile and took a slug of champagne. “And second and more important, because it's his night after all, to my sweet sweet son Joey.”

Here I thought my mother might sing, but Claire raised her eyes from the table and if they could have killed they would have. In all the years of those mortifying stares, I'd never seen one quite so powerful, quite so cruel.

I think it knocked her back from the table a step, but even if that's in my imagination, I'll tell you one thing, she sure didn't sing. Instead she smoothed her palms over that unruly hair, lowered her voice and said, before slumping into her seat, “To Joe.”

That night remains vivid for this scene, for my mother's performance, for my sister's mean eyes. Vivid because Claire was so pretty and assured in her new affectations, her new English lilt, telling us we
must
do this, we
must
do that. But more and above all, I think now, it is because I saw, or believed I saw in my mother's eyes, the dark settling talons, the slow-flowing tar. And this vision chilled me. This quick belief that within her lived the same thing that lived in me.

In an instant I began to believe, without evidence, without reason, that this punishing bird had flown from my mother to me. We shared it. Were its host. The great leaden beast was not only mine, but hers.

Listen, I am not one to see magic in the skies. I do not pretend to see the invisible world any more clearly than another person, but this, I am certain, was both premonition and prelude.

By the end of the night we were all watching Claire hold court and I was struck by a sadness so profound I could no longer eat. Was it that I knew then that my mother and I shared this migratory animal? Was it that I understood we were fracturing, our rare and resilient family? Or that we'd never been solid to begin with, that we were just four people barely bound together by fog and blood?

When Claire and I were young, my mother told us a thousand times in a thousand ways, “Nothing arrives
out of thin air
. There are precedents and there are signs. Always indicators and histories. Only an idiot or a child is surprised.”

Well, it seems to me now that ours were whispers and suggestion. They existed within the realm of the magical, imprecise, formless, and here I am looking, there between the fissures, for that faint sparkle of the other thing.

L
ater, after our parents went back to their hotel, I drove Claire to Chez Jay. We sat in the last booth at the back. “Sometimes Mel Gibson comes here,” I told her. “Sits right there.”

I wanted Claire to be impressed—by the solicitous girls smiling from the bar, the locals who knew me, my position here as reliable barman, my fresh degree. I was an autonomous, self-sufficient adult. I am a man, Claire. Here is my diploma, here is where I work. But she looked around that place as if she'd been tricked into being there.

She shrugged and studied me the way she always did—with tender indulgence—and raised her glass. “To the graduate,” she said, mocking my mother.

“Why can't you leave her be?” I said.

She shook her head and looked past me to the bar. “I'll leave her be when she stops making fools of us.”

“She doesn't make a fool of me.”

“Did you see what she was wearing? The way she drank?”

“A few glasses of champagne, Claire.”

“Enough to show you her bra.”

I changed the subject.

“Sean Penn, too,” I said. “He's a nice guy. Tips well.”

Claire ignored me. “So now what, Joey?”

In a few weeks I'd drive up the coast, camp with some friends in Big Sur, go back to Seattle, find a job somewhere. I had no other ambition, no further plan. Save for those three mean days, I'd always been happy. Was never restless the way Claire was. I'd never wanted other things the way she did.

“And then what?”

“Roam free.” I laughed.

“You're a moron.”

“Maybe I'll come visit you.”

“You should,” she said. And then, leaning in, “Hey Joe, I met someone. We might get married.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He's very, very rich.”

“So what?”

“You should see our life.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“And I'm the moron?”

“Don't tell Mom and Dad.”

“Why not?”

“Just don't, okay?”

“Thirty-eight, Claire?”

“Who cares? Come visit. You'll see.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. “And maybe I'll put a bullet in his head.”

She smiled and looked so far away and so much older than I would ever be.

Driving back I wanted to tell her about the tar. I wanted to ask if it was in her, or even if she knew what it was, but I couldn't muster the courage.

She hated being delivered to her expensive hotel in my truck, so I made sure to pull in slow, rev the engine, tap the horn.

It was the only power any of us ever had over my sister: our ability to humiliate her. The valets, irritated by the honking, waved me forward, but I stopped in the middle of the drive, made us a spectacle, got out and walked around to her side.

“You're such an asshole,” she said. “My sweet bartending graduate.”

I wrapped my arms around her and said, “I'll see you in London, you little snob.”

But I never saw Claire again.

A
few weeks later I loaded my truck, drove west along Sunset Boulevard to the ocean, and turned north. Then it was as if I'd never lived in that city at all.

Cut and run. Just like Claire. Just like my mother.

The cardboard boxes were fitted neatly into the bed of the truck. My father's old Army duffel. A blue plastic tarp covering it all, strapped down with a crisscross of orange bungee cords.

I'm in the empty apartment, all evidence of my former life erased.

“The past is dead,” my mother once loved to say. “Sink or swim, kids. Fight or die.”

I drove up PCH toward the future. My mother again. “Toward the future, Claire. Toward the future, Joey.” Another way of keeping her children moving, never, not for an instant, glancing back.

“Joey” from a song her long-dead father once loved to sing. Not Joseph, not Joe. “Joey, Joey, Joe,” she said and sang to me for so many years. “You've been too long in one place.” Whispered as a lullaby and sung at great volume on so many car trips to the coast. Said it like some kind of prophecy.

“Joey, Joey, Joe. You've been too long in one place. And now it's time to go.”

But it was my sister who got the message.

Me, I prefer to stay where I am.

W
hen we were young, we had the fortune of a secure and constant life.

My parents worked. Claire and I went to school. In the evenings we ate as a family around a rectangular table beneath a yellow light. If we made mistakes we were punished for them reasonably, with consideration. Those mistakes were insignificant. An occasional fight (me), a few incidents involving drugs (both of us), academic probation (me), vandalism (Claire), violations of curfew (Claire). None of it was irreversible. None of it destroyed us, or caused our parents any real worry. Both of them had grown up rough, as they often liked to remind us. Both had been poor, both just scraping by with parents of their own who had, in one way or another, abandoned them.

My father left for Vietnam three weeks after he finished high school. His mother had died in childbirth, and when he returned from war, his father, too was dead.

My mother left home at seventeen and never saw her parents again.

“Sink or swim,” she said whenever we got into trouble. “Sink or swim,” she said when she was angry or, much worse, disappointed. “Sink or swim, kid,” when our mistakes amused her.

And sometimes, “Fight or die, buddy,” when she was in a darker frame of mind.

This the guiding principle of her life.

My father probably worried more than my mother did, but as we grew up both of them looked on with cheerful bemusement and maintained as their general parenting strategy a kind of benevolent ambivalence. I think they could barely believe that Claire and I were theirs, that they'd provided us such safe and steady lives.

With all of our comforts, our regular meals and individual bedrooms, we were strange and privileged creatures who would never sink, but always swim.

M
y father was a carpenter who worked out of our garage, and on-site for various contractors around Seattle. My mother, Anne-Marie March, whose name you may know, was a nurse at Harborview. Depending on the year, my father was more or less often in his workshop, but she was always at the hospital, where she'd worked since graduating nursing school. Despite so many other options, she stayed in the ER where she began, and where she felt most at home.

What else of those very early years? After school there was the distant sound of my father working the band saw. The workshop smell of fresh-cut wood and orange oil. There he is standing in the kitchen dressing a cut index finger, bleeding calmly into the white sink, asking us about our homework, our friends, our teachers, our troubles. Our father surprising us with wooden knights and faeries, dragons and princesses beneath our pillows.

And my mother coming backwards through the front door with a low stack of pizza boxes. The exhilaration and relief of our reunited family in the evenings after school.

Maybe I overstate all this happiness of youth. Claire would probably say so. But I'm not so sure.

Whatever the case, ours was never a sentimental family. However happy we were, our parents always took a brutal attitude toward time.

“What's gone is gone. What's done is done. What's dead is dead,” my father said when we came home crying after some injury, slight or failure.

“And who,” my mother would add.

The two of them faced us in those moments like soldiers returned from a war neither of us could fathom.

“For better or for worse,” he said dealing pizza slices onto our plates.

“Mostly for the better,” my mother said.

I am nine years old. I have a black eye. My mother is walking me home through the neighborhood.

“Don't be blue, Joey Boy. It is difficult, but you are strong. It is difficult, but you are strong and next time you'll fight harder.”

There is golden sawdust caught in the hair of my father's forearms. Clear safety goggles perched on his head.

“There is nothing you can't do, Joe. Nothing in the world,” he says, pouring oil onto a rag.

“Fly? Be invisible? Become a lion?”

“Even those, kiddo. Even those.”

Then I'm wearing the goggles, too big for my face, his eyes through the scratched plastic lenses, he's lifting me up and I'm flying, arms outspread, and we're no longer in the workshop, but on the back lawn gliding to the roar of jets, the smell of his coffee breath.

I'm trying here to find some kind of order.

I want to do now what my father did in his later life. I want to see the world, our history, with peaceful clarity, find in it some pristine logic. Or no, maybe what he really did was give up on all that entirely. Maybe what he did best of all was surrender.

T
he drive to Big Sur must have been exquisite, but what I see from here are only stock photographs. That famous bridge. The ocean crashing into craggy rocks. The highway winding along at terrifying heights, the tall pines, dramatic headlands. These are not memories of experience, but of magazines.

Still, I'm certain I drove that road, and found my friends at a campground down by a good beach. I can no longer see their faces, but I was happy to find them there, happy to be drawn out of my mind.

We waded into the cold water, tore mussels from a looming black rock and collected them in our T-shirts. Arranged them on a damp plank of driftwood, and laid it on the fire. They are sputtering and snapping open as the wood smokes and blackens at the edges. We used their shells as knives to cut the flesh free, and as spoons to eat them. The most delicious food I'd ever tasted. Full of smoke and ocean. Someone had a guitar. We sang around a bonfire. We pulled cans of beer from an enormous white cooler full of ice. We sat with cold night air at our backs and firelight on our faces. I am standing at the ocean with a blond girl, our feet in the water and she is kissing me. I remember her warm mouth and the wind coming up and she's holding me to her with such force. She's touching my neck with her cool hand and then the two of us on the mattress in the back of my truck covered in a grey and white striped blanket. We're on our sides looking out at the ocean, and she's saying, “I love you, I love you,” and I remember thinking,
yes, why not
, said, “I love you, too,” and the way my saying “I love you, too” closed whatever space was left between us and she pushed back and I could feel her tight and so warm and the ocean was out there and everything would be fine and I was swimming not sinking, swimming not sinking. I was slow, kept my lips to her neck, whispered who knows what, pressed my hand between her legs. She was so wet then and embarrassed.