Swim Back to Me (26 page)

“Having a nice time?” I ask her.

“It’s lovely. Cressida’s very smart.”

My father straightens his back, lifts his chin.

“She knows her own mind,” my mother continues, ignoring or unaware that he’s peeved. “That’s unusual in someone so young.”

“Knows it?” my father says crisply. “Or thinks she knows it? And how could you decide which without being the expert yourself?”

My mother lifts one shoulder. She turns slightly, putting herself in quarter profile to us. The room is warm, and she plucks her caftan away from her chest several times.

“We’ve been talking,” he tells her, “about regret.”

She waits.

“And which is worse, guilt or humiliation. Which is it for you?”

“Sorry, Dan,” she says, “I’m not biting,” and she heads off without a pause, without even a glance back at us.

I don’t look at him, but I can feel him bristling. I’m in awe of her rules of nonengagement. She’s so detached and consistent. And yet not entirely avoidant, not as avoidant as I expected. Is this new, or does my memory misrecord her, so that each time she surprises me a little? She stayed at the B&B. Rode with us in the car. Sat with us for the ceremony. She returns and returns, as true and indifferent as the moon.

“What chicken shit,” he says.

The teenage girls who were passing trays earlier have disappeared, but one of them left a platter of aram sandwich spirals on a table, and I say, “Look, let’s grab some of those.”

“I was just making conversation,” he grumbles.

“You were baiting her. It was obnoxious.”

He presses his lips together and looks away as I load several sandwiches onto a small plate. “You know I’m right,” I say. “Now come on,” and I hold out the food.

He frowns and picks up a piece. “What is it?”

“Just eat it,” I say, and he takes a bite, and the whole thing promptly unrolls, releasing a few strips of turkey, a sodden length of lettuce, and a blob of tomato, all of which land on his suit jacket.

“For Christ’s sake,” he exclaims, brushing at the mess and creating several trails of mayo on his lapel. “Damn it. Look at me.”

I set the plate on the table and grab a napkin. As I dab, I attempt to make consoling noises, which just escalate his anger, and he cries, “Fuck!” loud enough so that the people closest to us fall silent. “Fuck,” he yells again,
“fuck,”
and now it’s the whole room, silent until the silence itself becomes the objectionable sound and people begin to talk again.

My father stalks away, and I shield my face with my hand, mortified. Why didn’t I head him off before he tried to provoke her? Or better yet, why didn’t I walk away when she did? I feel someone touch my shoulder and look up to find Peter at my side, frowning, his cheeks ghosted with the kiss marks of well-wishers.

He says, “God, I’m sorry.”

“
You’re
sorry.”

“We didn’t want you to get stuck with him tonight.”

“Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?”
I ask, the first of the four questions posed on Passover—“Why is this night different from all other nights?”—and he bursts out laughing.

“Wait,” I say, “she’s not Jewish, is she? Cressida?”

“You can’t believe I remember it?”

“It’s been a few decades.”

“I’ve been to the odd seder over the years,” he tells me, and then we say, simultaneously, “
Very
odd,” as if Dan were operating us like a puppeteer from wherever his pique took him.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” he says, and I think I’m not losing a brother,
he’s
losing a personal pronoun. This is a sour little thought, but I can’t help myself.

“We’re glad to be here,” I say. “You know that.”

My father sits on a folding chair directly in front of the gazebo where the ceremony took place, the set of his shoulders telling a story of boundless indignation. My mother stands against the wall, alone with her sketchpad, her pencil moving quickly over its surface. For a while I mill around, and then I join her and see that she’s drawing not people but flowers. “Aren’t the lantana pretty?” she says, but after another stroke or two she closes the sketchpad.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“No, I’d rather talk.” She smiles at me. “I want you to know that I have regrets.”

“It’s OK.”

“No, I want to say this. I have regrets, but only one about leaving your father.”

“I know,” I say. “You regret the message it sent me and Peter about the impermanence of love.”

She looks puzzled.

“No?”

“No.”

“That’s what you told me on my wedding day. What’s your one regret?”

“How interesting,” she says. “I suppose that was what I felt, for a long time.” She reaches up and touches her earlobe, a nervous habit I remember from long ago.

“And now?”

She takes a deep breath. “Now I regret that you ended up in a caretaker role. I regret,” she says, looking deeply into my eyes, “that because of my choice to leave him, that role was available for you to take.”

I’m surprised by this—shocked, actually; I never knew she felt this way and can’t believe she is saying so—but while all kinds of responses crowd my mind, the one I speak sounds hollow and is, in certain ways, beside the point. I say, “He isn’t that bad. He’s lived a good life.”

And she says, “What about you?”

My entire body warms under the heat of her regard. What
about
me, and why ask now? For years we’ve been so careful, my mother and I, around the great disappointment that is my circumscribed life, always in concert in our efforts to keep the identity of the draftsman—or, rather, the draftsmen—out of sight. Shall I tell her about the tiny pleasure of tending my herb garden, about the excessive thanks I get from the colleagues to whom I make small gifts of dried thyme? Shall I tell her about the relief I feel now that the “introductions” I am sometimes offered to unattached men have devolved from awkward dinner parties to quick e-mails? Shall I tell her about the unexpected delight of a good TV show, especially a drama that unfolds over many episodes and encourages the blocking out of an entire evening each week for three or even six months? Or shall I tell her that my father’s piss smells like raw meat?

The look on her face is classic Joanie, an unlikely mix of impassive and caring. I shrug, deciding to stay quiet—if you could call such inertia a decision—and she raises her eyebrows ever so slightly.

Just then there’s a chiming sound from the far side of the room, and I turn to see Peter and Cressida in front of a table bearing a magnificent four-tiered wedding cake. Cressida has a knife in one hand and a wineglass in the other. “Hello,” she calls out, and then, louder,
“Hello,”
her voice a good-size bellow that for some reason pleases me deeply. I step closer to them.

“First,” she says, “we want to thank you all for being here. And second, as far as this thing on the table behind us goes, did you really think I was going to let my mother bake oatmeal cookies?”

Everyone laughs and applauds, and then there are toasts, and speeches, and finally the cake is wheeled away to be sliced and served. When I finally look back over my shoulder, my mother is gone. My father is still seated, but he is no longer the only one; chairs have been pulled this way and that, into small and large circles, into pairs. His shoulders are curved now, his head is down.

A passing girl offers me a piece of wedding cake. I lift the plate to my face and breathe in the sugary sweetness, then spot my mother near the back of the room. I approach her, extending the plate on my palm when I get close and lifting it high.

She smiles a slightly puzzled smile. “That’s something. What is that? I’ve forgotten.”

My father would be cackling by now. I lower the plate but keep it extended. “Wedding cake. We can share it.”

She raises her palm, mimicking the way I held the plate. “No, it’s something from Stanford. That year.”

“ ‘Your gâteau.’ ”

“That’s right, ‘Your gâteau.’ That was so silly.” She smiles again, but after a moment a sober look comes over her face and she says, “You know, I came close to leaving him that year—I thought about it constantly. I think I would have if it hadn’t been for that boy, that friend of yours, remember? From around the corner?”

I shake my head.

“You don’t remember?”

I’m thinking: Then? Then you thought of leaving? That early? This is the kind of information that derails entire histories—the family equivalent of moving the start date of the Vietnam War back a decade, say, thereby throwing off your memory of everything that happened before and since. “Remember who?” I say.

“That boy. Your friend.”

“A boy would’ve been a friend of Peter’s.”

“No, he was yours. And his mother had left his father, and I felt so sorry for him, such a forlorn, lost child. All I could think was, I can’t do that to my kids. It took me three years to figure out that if I wasn’t doing it
to
you, then I could do it.”

I nod. This is more than she’s said to me on the subject in thirty-five years, and I don’t really want to hear about it, not now. I don’t feel like listening; earlier, I didn’t feel like talking. Is this what I do with my parents? Want what I can’t have and then once I can have it, stop wanting it?

She reopens her sketchpad. “I should get them as they’re saying goodbye,” she says, and I look over and see Peter and Cressida at the door, hugging their guests.

Across the room is my father, looking at me. It’s long past time for me to begin the process of restoring him to himself. I start toward him, and once he sees I’m finally coming he looks away, like a timid girl at a school dance, afraid to jinx the approach of a suitor.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Geri Thoma and Julia Kenny at the Markson Thoma Literary Agency, and to everyone at Knopf and Vintage, especially Jordan Pavlin and Leslie Levine. I wrote these stories over the course of many years and solicited readings, interpretations, and words of advice from more wise people than I can name and thank here. I am especially grateful to Sylvia Brownrigg, Ann Cummins, Nancy Johnson, Lisa Michaels, Cornelia Nixon, Ron Nyren, Angela Pneuman, Sarah Stone, and Vendela Vida, who read many drafts and helped me see how these pages could form a book.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Packer is the author of two best-selling novels,
Songs Without Words
and
The Dive from Clausen’s Pier
, which received a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Library Association Award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue
, and
Real Simple
. Also the author of
Mendocino and Other Stories
, she lives in northern California with her family.