The Good House: A Novel (13 page)

“Oh,” I said. “That’s a beautiful road. Did you know that’s Peter Newbold’s house there at the end—near the beach?” I said it before thinking and worried for a moment that Rebecca might be embarrassed that I knew that Peter was her psychiatrist, but she brightened when I mentioned his name and said, “I know.” She pulled a huge canvas from the back of the studio and said, “This is a painting from a photograph taken from his lawn.”

“Lovely, Rebecca,” I said. Then: “So you’ve been to Peter and Elise’s house?” I’d never been in therapy and had no idea, therefore, whether it was usual or unusual for patients to socialize with their doctors. But it made sense to me that the McAllisters and the Newbolds would get along, as couples, and it seemed altogether likely that they were all friends.

“Yes … well, actually, I’ve never been inside, but I was taking photographs down there and Peter came wandering down the beach. I was standing almost in front of his house. I had no idea.”

I was facing Rebecca when she said this, so I was able to see that she was telling me a lie. I thought she was going to continue, but she stopped talking and was biting her lip. Then she smiled and said, “Well, long story short, it turns out Peter’s very into photography, too, and he said I could take photographs from his lawn if I wanted to.”

“Oh, I do really love that one,” I said, taking a step closer to the huge canvas she was holding up. I didn’t care to pursue her little untruth. We all lie on occasion; there’s usually nothing behind it. But I wouldn’t lie about somebody’s artwork. I don’t tell people I like things if I don’t. I usually just say nothing. I really did love Rebecca’s painting. It made me almost smell the sea. It was beautiful.

“Actually, Peter took the photograph,” Rebecca said. “He gave it to me when I admired it, and then I painted it.”

“I adore Peter,” I said. “He’s such a nice man. I’m sure he’s quite a good therapist.…”

I was watching for Rebecca’s reaction, but when she answered, her back was to me. She was placing the paintings back against the wall.

“Yes … well, he’s not really a therapist to me. He prescribed some medication that I needed, that’s all. It … well, it changed my life. I’ve seen different shrinks over the years, and have been prescribed various antidepressants.… God, I barely know you and I’m telling you all this,” Rebecca said. She turned and smiled at me. Rebecca had carried her wineglass down from the house, and now she lifted it from a paint-speckled table and took a sip. It pleased me to see that Rebecca enjoyed her wine. I always notice the way people drink. I like it when I spot what I think is a fellow lover of spirits. I suspected that Rebecca was my kind.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “People tell me everything. But I don’t gossip.”

And I don’t, really. Not about real stuff.

“Well, there’s not much to tell. Peter prescribed a medication that finally worked for me. Now I’m not depressed.”

“So, I’ve always been curious about these antidepressants,” I said. Both my daughters take them. I won’t take pills. “Do you feel sedated on them? High?”

“No, most of them make you feel like shit, actually. Like a dullard swimming through some thick muck all the time. But the stuff Peter has me on … well, I started feeling better, little by little. One day, I suddenly noticed how good food tastes. I was eating something silly, an English muffin, I think it was, and suddenly I thought,
This is the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.
That’s why I’ve put on a few pounds. Food tastes good again.”

It was true, Rebecca had gained a few, but she needed to.

“I’d be petting the dog and thinking,
How did I never notice how soft his coat is before?
I had never felt anything so soft.”

“Wow, you should be on one of those commercials for the company that makes whatever you’re on,” I said, and Rebecca laughed. She really did make it sound appealing. It sounded like being permanently on your second drink. Not drunk, but not desperately sober. That would be a nice way to be all the time, I supposed. We looked at a few more paintings and then we decided to head down to the house for dinner.

“Your wine,” I said. She almost left it behind.

“Oh, right,” Rebecca said, and grabbed the glass. She sipped the rest of the wine in that glass as she served up the stew and then she drank water with me as we ate. I can’t help it, I notice the way people drink. I’m always surprised by the kind of person who can have just a glass of wine or two and then switch to water. Rebecca hadn’t struck me as one of those, but now it appeared that she was.

*   *   *

When I left Rebecca’s that night, I drove down Wendover Rise, but instead of turning toward the river and my house, I decided to drive past Getchell’s Cove, just to get a look at the harvest moon on the water. There were still a few boats moored there. I recognized Oatie Clarke’s old Chris-Craft and the Steins’ sailboat and the Westons’, and I watched them bob up and down beneath the golden light of the moon, the gentle water sparkling all around. I thought about the little sailboat I used to keep moored there in the cove. Frankie Getchell gave it to me that summer before college. It was an old Widgeon that he had found at the dump, salvaged, and repaired. He patched up the hull, painted it bright red, and told me I could have it. He taught me to sail. I don’t think they make Widgeons anymore. You never see them, but they’re a great little sailboat. They have a jib and a mainsail and there’s room for two people, but it’s still small enough to sail alone. We named her
Sarah Good,
after my ancestress, and we spent many afternoons sailing out of Wendover Harbor; me in the striped bikini I wore that whole summer, Frank, shirtless, in a pair of baggy painter’s pants. We scrambled over each other’s limbs, cursing and laughing, when I was learning to tack and jibe, and more than once, I managed to capsize us. A Widgeon isn’t the easiest boat to right, but Frank taught me how to stand on the centerboard and use my body to rock her back upright. He taught me to do it myself, in case I was ever out alone. I became a sailor. We got so that we sailed with such ease, Frank and me. We really didn’t talk much; there wasn’t the need. We’d rig her silently; then Frank would sit back against the stern with the tiller tucked under his arm and a cigarette dangling from his easy smile. I would lean into the beefy crook of his thighs, the jib sheet tucked between my fingers and my face angled up at the sun. It was just that one summer. Then I went off to college. But I kept
Sarah Good.
I had a friend with a trailer who would help me pull her out at the end of the summer, and I stored her in my dad’s backyard all winter, her hull breaching up through the snow like the broad back of a red whale surrounded by a swelling white sea.

The first time Scott visited me in Wendover was the summer after our junior year. I used to borrow Butchie Haskell’s skiff to row out to my mooring, and as we pulled up alongside my little dented sailboat, Scott, who was always great at impressions, let loose with a great cry of “My, but she’s yar.” We both cracked up and spent the afternoon sailing around Wendover Harbor, talking like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Of course, we both wanted to be Katharine Hepburn. I know this is hard to believe, but until Scott told me he was gay, almost sixteen years into our marriage, I’d had absolutely no clue.

nine

“
Hi, Mom, it’s me, Tess. Grady’s sick today. He’s all right, just a bad cold. We’re going to stay home with him tonight, so we won’t be needing you. But thanks anyway. Oh, but call me when you get a chance. I want to talk to you about Thanksgiving.”

The message had been left on my home phone. It was Friday evening.

Shortly after I returned from rehab, Tess and Michael had started asking me to baby-sit on occasional evenings. Then it had turned into an every Friday kind of thing—a date night for them, and a date night for me and little Grady. I really did look forward to my time with Grady. I won’t bore you with all the doting grandmother stories, but allow me this one: I had been there the past Friday, the Friday before the night they canceled because he was sick, and Grady was sitting in his high chair. He had just finished his “supper.”

When my girls were babies, their meals were rather simple affairs. I vaguely remember a plastic plate separated into two or three compartments, and I used to fill these compartments with food—meat, vegetables, maybe a little fruit. They had a sippy cup of milk. Before that, I nursed them.

Grady’s meals are complicated and serious affairs, each and every one of them. They have been since the day he was born. Tess had sought out “lactation specialists” shortly after she arrived home from the hospital, because she was afraid the baby wasn’t getting enough milk. Once they sorted out the breast-feeding, he was colicky, so they consulted all sorts of doctors and nutritionists. A lactose intolerance was discovered, and Grady was allowed only soy milk once his mother weaned him. No milk, no cheese, no butter. And though Grady had never been near a peanut in his short life, there was a cousin on Michael’s side who had a peanut allergy, so nothing with peanuts or peanut oil was allowed in the house. They were in the process of trying to “rule out” a gluten allergy.

“What’s left?” I asked Tess. “What will he live on?”

Tess and Michael hated when I asked questions about Grady’s diet, and Michael actually said to me one day, “We worry, when you make little offhand comments about his food issues, that you’re not taking them seriously and that you might … forget and give Grady the wrong thing to eat.”

I assured him that I knew the “food issues” were serious, and of course I would never feed Grady anything he wasn’t supposed to have, though I have often entertained wicked fantasies of sneaking him a little cup of ice cream or a sliver of cake. The baby didn’t eat. And who could blame him? But anyway, that Friday night, Grady had finished pushing around his meal of pureed organic peas, gluten-free pasta, and some kind of soy burger, and while I was wiping off the high chair’s tray, he was just beaming up at me.

He calls me “Gammy.” It makes my heart soar.

This is another reason I’m grateful to the girls for my intervention. Tess and Michael would never have left Grady with me when I drank so much. I really did drink too much; I see that now. After those months of abstinence—the month at Hazelden and the two that followed—I knew that I could go without alcohol as long as I wanted, so I never drank before going to see Grady. It was good for me to abstain for a night or two each week. Often, I didn’t even have a glass of wine when I got home from baby-sitting; I was so tired that I just went to bed.

Anyway, that night, after supper, Grady grinned up at me, and I was at a little bit of a loss as to what to do with him. He was saying only a few words then, but he looked quite happy in his high chair, so I said, “Do you want Gammy to sing for you?”

“Mmmmmmmmnnnnnnn,” he grunted, which meant yes.

So I sang “Good Morning Starshine,” just like Scott and I used to sing for the girls. I just sang the first verse. That’s all I could remember. I hadn’t sung anything in years. When I was finished, I smiled at Grady and he grinned at me again and then clapped his hands. Then he said, “MORE,” which was one of his few words, and I sang it again.

I lifted him out of his chair and changed his diaper and put him into his jammies. Then I sat on the sofa, bounced him on my knee, and sang him a few songs. I sang some Joni Mitchell songs and I sang Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” but I could never do a Billie Holiday song justice; Scott did a great Billie Holiday. I sang, “Wild Horses … couldn’t drag me awa-a-ay…” and I sang him some of the songs Scott had written when we were in college. I even remembered most of the words.

Scott and I met after we joined an a cappella group at UMass, and then we started up our own little folk group with another couple. We called ourselves the Knobs. (Don’t ask—we thought it was cool.) We used to play at these coffeehouses in and around Amherst and Holyoke. The girls teased us mercilessly about this, about how much they hated that music, but when they were little, Scott and I used to be able to get them to sing along with us in the car. We taught them to harmonize a little. Emily, especially, has a very beautiful voice, and she and Scott would sing all sorts of songs together. And I think little Grady has an ear for music. He has a natural sense of rhythm. He was bobbing his head along with the music, and every time I finished a song, he cried out, “MORE. MORE.”

God, I love that child. Tess told me that was his very first word.
More.

Of course it was. He’s my grandson. He’s like me more than Tess or Michael will ever see. I suspect that my first word was
more
(though whether it would have penetrated my mother’s clogged mind is impossible to know). But the point is, when it comes to joy, I never have my fill. I’ve always wanted more, just like my little Grady.

So that Friday, after playing my messages, I was sad to be missing Grady, but I was slightly relieved that I didn’t have to make the drive to Marblehead. It was cold and rainy. I decided it was a nice night to throw a few logs in the fireplace and watch a movie with my dogs. We went out to the boathouse first, of course. I realized that I would need to be moving the wine indoors soon. It would be freezing before long and I had been trying to come up with another storage spot that the girls would never discover. There was a crawl space in the cellar that I thought would be perfect. I just hadn’t gotten around to moving the wine yet. It was almost eight and it was very dark, so I walked back to the house slowly, carrying the bottle by its neck, when suddenly a car pulled into my driveway. I froze, like a fugitive, the bottle hanging at my side like a spent weapon.

“Hildy?” called a woman’s voice.

I was squinting into the headlights but couldn’t see who was calling. Who would just show up on a night like that? I walked around to the side of the car and saw that it was a silver Land Cruiser. Rebecca was behind the wheel. She was shaking and crying, covering her eyes with her hand.

“Rebecca? What’s wrong?” I asked. “What is it?”