Up Island (4 page)

So our paths were laid down from the beginning, and so we have continued since, in lockstep, four people destined and doomed to bear on our shoulders the living, holy ark of The Family. When I think of my mother’s voice, it is this that I hear her say: “Family comes first, always. Blood is everything.”

I told what I could of this to Livvy Bowen that morning.

“Your mother’s obviously read too much William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams,” Livvy said. “I can just see her in Williams. God. ‘Blood is everything’ my ass. Who does that make Tee and…what’s Kevin’s little wife’s name again? I can’t ever remember. Chopped liver? Official consorts? Does she include them in this family stuff? Do you?”

“Sally. Her name is Sally,” I said, obscurely annoyed. My attempt to explain The Family to Livvy had obviously fallen short. “Of course she includes

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them. Of course I do. Tee is family for me, just like Sally is for Kevin. Tee and Caroline and Teddy for me; Sally and Amanda for him. There was never any question in Mother and Daddy’s minds that we would marry and have children.

That’s what makes family.”

But did it? Mother was drawn to Tee from the beginning, I knew that; she teased and flirted with him, charmed his conservative northside parents, shone as if klieg-lit when we invited her to the driving club, was the focus of all eyes at the parties we gave in Collier Hills and later in Ansley Park.

Tee gave my mother the one thing her foreshortened career had not: social status, a chance to show what she could have been if not burdened early with a gigantic daughter and dancing lessons in her garage.

But I don’t think she ever approved of my marrying him.

Tee should have been a woman. Then Kevin could have had him, and so had the matched consort that Mother had always envisioned for him. The only time Kevin ever really defied her was when he married Dresden-exquisite, utterly conventional Sally Hardy from below-the-salt Lakewood. Mother ceased excoriating Sally—delicately, of course—only when Kevin threatened to move with her to Nashville or Charleston or somewhere out of firing range. I don’t think Mother ever saw that Kevin could not have lived with a woman who was Tee’s equivalent in money, charm, and assurance. Where would he have drawn his audience then?

No, I think Mother somehow thought he would marry
her.

His mother, that oldest love. I don’t think she ever forgave Kevin Sally, any more than she did me Tee Redwine. The order should have been

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reversed. Both of us, in our choices, threatened the sleek skin of The Family.

“Well, the pattern has held, hasn’t it?” Livvy said, nuking our cooling coffee in the microwave and producing pastries from Harry’s in a Hurry, just up the street on Peachtree Road.

“You’re still the good girl, the dutiful one. Woman of the Year in Volunteerism, or whatever, last year, right? And Kevin’s still the white hope. Top local anchor in D.C., with network written all over him. And your mother is still the family star, running those recitals all over town, still looking like a gazelle and wearing those incredible hats. And your dad’s still wiring lamps and making bookcases in the basement, and going to all her recitals and all Teddy’s tennis matches and all your awards banquets. Does any of you know who you are? Do you know who those people who live at your house are? Jesus, no wonder your butt itches at the thought of the act breaking up!”

I have always loved Livvy’s blunt pragmatism, but she can be spectacularly wrong, too, in the manner of one who has always been so sure of her blood and money and place in the world that she has never had to question it. I knew that she was wrong now. But somehow her earth-rooted words soothed the sucking terror in my stomach and eased my shallow breathing. Something in my mind moved an imper-ceptible fraction of an inch forward, like a gear clicking into place, my self came flooding back, and the thin, acid, starving air around me thickened into nourishing normality.

“A fine one you are to pooh-pooh blood,” I said, grinning around a mouthful of apple turnover. “Yours is bluer than ink and so is Caleb’s. I don’t notice any
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transfusions of rich, rude, peasant blood in your line, on either side.”

“Blood is not a policy in either of our families,” she said sulkily. Livvy hates being hoisted on the petard of her lineage.

“The hell it’s not. That’s just what it is.”

We stared at each other over the antique cherry game table that the Bowens use for family meals—Liv had once told me that George Washington was supposed to have played cards on it on his way to the Battle of Mounmouth—and then we laughed.

Later we went to lunch. I offered the club, but Livvy dislikes it. She says the people who go there, even to play savage tennis, do not sweat, they mist. So we went instead to a funky little place on Peachtree Road called R. Thomas, overflowing with lovingly tended flowers and herbs and raffish, cheerful, talking birds in cages; the last bastion, Liv claims, of the Age of Aquarius. I like it, too; the vegetarian dishes are rich and wonderful, but no one I know frequents it. Carrie Davies isn’t all that sure it’s clean. So I go there only with Livvy.

After lunch she dropped me back at Charlie’s building to pick up my car.

“So when is Tee due back?” she said, sticking her head out the Saab’s window.

“Day after tomorrow. But he goes right out again Monday.”

“Do me a favor. Take the two days just for yourself. Cancel all your good works and let Teddy fend for himself. He’s too old for you to hover over, anyway. Spend a day at Seydell and get the works—haircut, facial, massage, makeup, all of it. Then go to Neiman Marcus and buy yourself something fabulous to sleep in. Order in Friday night. Chill the wine, light the candles.

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Attack Tee the minute he walks in the door; take no prisoners.

Whatever it was that was terrific about your first roll in the hay, do it again.
Then
ask him if he’s having an affair.”

“I couldn’t ask that…”

“Ask
him, Moll. Jesus, you Southern belles. How do you ever find out anything you want to know if you don’t ask?

I’ll guarantee you’ll like his answer.”

“Well…”

“Guarantee.
By the time you two get out of bed, your butt will be as smooth as a baby’s. See if it’s not.”

I left her laughing. I was laughing, too. In the two hours I had spent with her, Livvy had given me back my old life, my old self, my old context. I drove back down Peachtree toward Ansley Park humming “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie”

under my breath. The sun was shining and the flower borders in the midtown office buildings looked festive and European.

It was, at that moment, utterly absurd to me that I had ever thought Tee was anybody but my beautiful, comfortable old Tee; that I was a cuckolded wife instead of the cherished Molly I had always been; that the family was newly and sickeningly endangered. I could not even remember how the fear had felt. I stopped at a produce truck in a parking lot and bought huge red Florida tomatoes and cucumbers and the last of the Vidalia onions. I would make gazpacho for the weekend. Both Tee and Teddy loved it. Perhaps I would go by European Gourmet and pick up something wonderful for Friday night dinner. Maybe I
would
go to Neiman Marcus; it had been a long time since I had slept in anything but an old, extra-large Black Dog T-shirt that Livvy had brought me from Martha’s Vineyard, where Caleb’s family had had a summer

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place for generations. It was so old and washed that the shiny black dog stuff had half flaked off, and the Martha’s Vineyard signature labrador was a dalmatian instead. Something pale and silky, maybe, to set off the swimming tan I hardly ever lost and make my light blue eyes flame in the dark, as Tee had sworn they did when we first went to bed together. And if there was time, perhaps a good blunt haircut to tame the wild black-and-silver tangle that I never could subdue. I drew the line at dye, or even a rinse. But the other things, maybe.

No. Definitely.

When I got home, still humming, and tossed the tomatoes on to the kitchen table, Teddy called to me from the rump-sprung sofa in the library that was his television lair. I walked through my Eurotech kitchen and into the book-lined cave that Tee had made for himself and that the entire family had appropriated. I could see nothing of my son but enormous feet in new Nikes hanging over the sofa’s arm, but I knew how he would look: a long sprawl of tanned, sinewy arms and legs furred with the soft gold of his thick hair, dark blue eyes half closed, long, mobile mouth chewing whatever he had fished out of the refrigerator. He is Tee from the top of his head to his soles, except that Tee would die before he wore an earring. Teddy has had his for two years. So far it has not sent him spiraling into delinquency or homosexuality.

Lazarus, so named because we got him from the pound only hours before his appointment in Samarra, would be lying on the floor beside the sofa with his big, hairy muzzle on Teddy’s stomach, and Teddy would be lazily scratching the top of his head. Lazarus is huge and shaggy and looks put together from leftover dog parts. We have never been sure what breeds

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met in him to produce such a strange animal. All of us adore him, and he us, almost embarrassingly so, but none of us is under any illusions about Lazarus. He will learn no tricks, win no ribbons, save none of us from fire or attack. Lazarus’s only talent is love.

I looked over the back of the couch. There they were, as I had pictured them. Lazarus thumped his tail, and Teddy raised a hand in languid salute.

“What are you doing home?” I said. “I thought you were taking Mindy to get her driver’s license.”

“We had a fight. She was acting like a shit. I told her so.

I said I wasn’t going to be responsible for her being a shit on wheels. I think her mom is taking her,” my beautiful son said, not fully opening his eyes.

“Language, sport,” I said automatically. “You’re going to have to apologize to her, you know.”

But I was not sorry they had had a fight. Mindy Terrell is a strident, possessive girl with spectacularly disquieting looks and an obsessive attachment to Teddy. She was, I had thought, older at barely sixteen than I had been at twenty-five.

“In a pig’s ass,” Teddy said. “Let her call me. And she will.

Speaking of calling, Dad called a few minutes ago. He’s coming in tonight. He said he’d be real late, so not to wait up.”

“What’s the matter?” I said, my heart beginning to suck and drag again. “Why is he coming in early?”

“I don’t know. Nothing’s wrong. He just said he wanted to see us, just wanted to talk to us. Said we’d have a long breakfast in the morning. He sounded homesick.”

I smiled. Warmth spread through the middle of me. Tee used to cut his trips short sometimes just to come home and see us, and we’d always have a long

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pancake and sausage and conversation breakfast the next morning. The morning after the night of his homecoming…my face colored at the thought of those nights. He had not done it in a long time, though. Did I have time for Neiman Marcus? No, but there was that black chiffon thing he’d ordered for me, as a joke, from Frederick’s of Hollywood two Christmases back. The one with the slit in the bikini panties. I wondered if I could still get into it.

It makes no difference. I’ll be out of it in no time, I thought, running up the stairs toward our bedroom with the idea of changing the sturdy, striped wash-and-wear sheets for the ivory Porthault ones my mother-in-law had given me for some unremembered anniversary. She had them even on her beds in the Redwine beach house on Sea Island. She also had Isobel to wash and iron them. I had never taken mine out of the ribbons they’d come in.

“Oh, by the way, Ma, how’s your bee-hind?” Teddy called up the stairs after me, and as if on cue, the itching flame-stitched itself across my buttocks.

“Going to be fine,” I called back, scratching hard. “Charlie thinks it’s an allergy.”

“Jeez, I hope it’s not to me or Lazarus, or to Dad.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I yelled, and went into the bedroom to peel off my panty hose and panties and soak my affronted rear in a warm tub.

Tee was very late coming in. I have usually fallen early into a light, waiting sleep since he has been traveling for Coke on this assignment, but this time I was awake. His step on the stairs was so familiar that I could feel it in the beat of my blood; there was the place he always UP ISLAND / 33

broke stride, where the landing curved, and there was the next-to-top step that always creaked. I thought that there was something different about tonight, though, and then realized that his footsteps were slower, and heavier. Tired; he must be so tired. This insane traveling had gone on for far too long.

He came quietly into the bedroom, as he always did when I slept, and moved about with the ease of one who has undressed in this familiar dark many times before. I heard his shoes fall, and then the rustle that meant his pants were going down, and the little swish as he tossed them on the ottoman from the big blue easy chair under the window that looked out over the garden. The smaller swish of his shirt followed.

He went into the bathroom and closed the door. I waited until I heard the toilet flush and the lavatory water stop running, and then reached for the switch on the bedside lamp.

When I heard the door open again, I clicked it on.

“Hey, meester, you wan’ a girl?” I called.

He froze in the flare of light, staring at me with near black, unfocused eyes. His face was emptied out and utterly still.

For a moment my breath stopped. He looked mortally tired, bled white, old. His face was all angles and hollows in the shadows, and the stubble on his chin was so pronounced that I could see it from across the room. It is so fine and light a gold that you almost can never tell when he needs a shave.

“Honey?” I said tentatively, and sat up in bed in a great rustle of plastic. And then his face crumpled and he began to laugh.