Impossible Vacation (25 page)

Babs and Dad married less than a year after both their mates did themselves in. I didn’t blame them for that. It must have been hell to live alone swamped in those painful memories. Babs’s family was less tolerant of her new marriage, and her older son was acting like Hamlet when he complains about his mother getting married before the funeral meats were cold. He’d have nothing to do with Dad or Babs after the wedding. Her younger son was more demonstrative. He had just returned from Vietnam addicted to heroin and ended up burning down Babs’s old farmhouse, with most of her antiques in it, when he was stoned and crashing there with a bunch of his Nam buddies. They got out before the fire got them, but the farmhouse was a total loss. By then, Dad and Babs had moved into their new home just down the road from the dark spot where Mom had died in the driveway. Such a history of pain. I went over it again to myself and out loud to Meg, who stared ahead into that holiday rush like a freaked-out fighter pilot trying to land her plane.

As we pulled in on that black asphalt driveway, we saw the whole yard as an immaculate stage setting that gave our eyes some rest, after the hectic highway. It was blessed order, perhaps the result of a fascist mind, but certainly the best part of it: the fresh-cut lawn, as well-kept as a golf course; the flagpole with the American flag fluttering slightly in a gentle southeasterly wind up from Narragansett Bay, which lay in the distance far below.

Dad and Babs must have been on the lookout for us (most likely their entire morning’s activity), because as soon as Meg parked our van, they came out of the front door onto the flagstone terrace to greet us. Dad cried “Hi-ho, hi-ho!” in some strange parody of a party voice, like an actor who was standing close to you on stage but making his voice sound as if it was coming from far away.

“Hi, kids,” Babs said, and Meg and I both delivered the obligatory pecks on Babs’s weathered, leathery face with its rosy glow of ruptured capillaries. Then there was the obligatory bundle-of-wire hug
with Dad, followed by his old quick pat on my back, his almost pleading signal for release from too much intimacy. We all backed away from each other. Meg and I had arrived.

As soon as I stepped into that house the panic began. I kept having flashes of India, Amsterdam, and fantasies of Bali. I kept thinking I could be in Bali now rather than here, and every time I thought that I’d realize I wasn’t in either place. I wasn’t in Rhode Island and I wasn’t in Bali. I was stuck like some tortured ghost in a self-created limbo between a place I had seen too much of and a place I had never seen.

When I saw Dad’s bright blue swimming pool out the living room window, it occurred to me that was exactly where I wanted to be. That was the reason I’d come home in the first place. I’d come home so I could swim in Dad’s pool. I sensed the only thing that could bring me back into this world was to immerse myself in it, and I rushed to change into my Speedo swimsuit while Meg brought our bags into the guest room.

Babs went into the kitchen to start dinner and Dad followed me around the house asking me what I was doing, as I did the obvious, and then commented on it for him. “Now I’m changing into my swimsuit, Dad. Now I’m going for a swim in your pool, Dad. Don’t worry about me, Dad, I won’t drown.”

Stepping into their backyard was like walking into a Kodachrome Hollywood postcard, a synthetic reality. The very unreality of it allowed me to be there, as I stepped out, a little chilled in my new slim, fatless body, the string of my Speedo Ocean Brief pulled tight to take up the slack.

Above the pool was a powder-blue sky with streaks of pink from the descending sun, and the sliver of a new moon could just be seen. Below this expanse of blue, framed by the high wooden fence that surrounded the back patio, was the other blue of the magnificent protected pool and its deck of dark green Astroturf. I could feel the turf’s cool oily resilience under my bare feet as I moved toward that perfectly heated water and plunged. That dive and its mad splash, the facedown beating strokes that carried me from one end of the pool to the other, made me feel like I had arrived at last.

But that feeling was almost instantly broken by Dad’s following me around the edge of the pool with his ongoing, chattering commentary
about how he had measured the temperature at a steady seventy-six degrees all day, and didn’t I want to have a look at his new automatic robot pool cleaner. It was also broken by Babs calling from the kitchen window, “My goodness, Brewster, we’re going to have to put some fat on that body of yours! It looks like India has turned you two kids into skeletons.” I was too excited by the fact that Babs had acknowledged our trip to India to care that she had broken my picture of perfection.

I was still swimming when my body sensed, as if participating in a kind of intuition of fluids and liquids, the encroaching cocktail hour. The cast of melancholy light breaking over the tops of distant elms and maples sent terns, sparrows, and swallows flying home to their night nests and left the sad, empty, lonely chirping of robins on distant lawns. All of this made the entire swimming pool feel like a giant dry martini, and gave me the sign that it was at last cocktail hour. I pulled myself out, wrapped up in one of Babs’s big, fluffy, brightly colored bath towels, and went in to change.

As Meg and I passed through that dustless, posh, wall-to-wall-carpeted living room, we saw Babs nervously thumbing through
House and Garden
, waiting for Dad, who paced by one of the antique grandfather clocks, to give the official bartender’s “okay.” The clock said five of five and I could feel that familiar, tense anticipation grow in the room as the hands of the clock slowly moved round and struck: one, two, three, four, five; and all the tension of the day gave way as Dad said, at last, in that formal bartender’s voice, “May I fix you a drink, Mrs. North?”

Babs put down her magazine as if she were surprised by this offer. She just sat there for a moment pretending to consider it, as if she might at any moment say no and order cranberry juice instead. And then in the most casual tone that she could deliver—and she delivered it as convincingly as any good actress might—Babs said, “Well, I don’t mind if I do, Mr. North. Do you think you could fix me a dry vodka martini with three onions?”

And Mr. North answered, “Well, I don’t know why not,” and they were off for their glorious cocktail ritual, Babs going into the TV room to turn on the local news while Dad headed for the bar to begin his measuring and pouring. Soon the tinkle of ice against glass blended
with the local news and the Muzak that played in every room under it all.

Before Mom died, and in the early years while we were growing up, there was no formal cocktail hour in our home, perhaps because Mom didn’t drink, and Dad drank very little in those days. He kept his bottles out of sight. When he opened the liquor cabinet in the dining room, he always took out a bottle of bourbon and measured it carefully. He used to make two tall bourbon-and-waters, which he drank sequentially—just enough to relax.

But now that Dad had a wife who was also a drinking partner, the bottles were proudly on display, sitting there on a fully equipped bar with lots of cocktail accessories. It looked like a little altar.

Although Babs had a vision of herself as a gourmet cook, it was not so easy for her to drink and cook a gourmet meal at the same time. We were usually doomed to raw meat and oversteamed vegetables. For some reason it never went the other way; we never ended up with raw vegetables and overcooked meat. I guess that had to do with Dad’s needs. Only Dad knew how to cook a steak while completely high on bourbon, and Dad wasn’t cooking that night. He was waiting for the Fourth to do his big barbecue.

That night Babs served us frozen frogs’ legs. They came out on a plate looking like the hairless amputated legs of Lilliputian Olympic runners. Meg and I both rolled our eyes and looked across at each other. It was funny how Babs’s cooking was bringing Meg and me closer; and as we looked at each other, Babs slipped those hairless little legs, garnished with parsley, onto our TV tables somewhere in the middle of a national news report about the tall ships.

Meg could hardly touch them, but I was drunk enough to eat them whole and ask for seconds. After dinner and dessert, somewhere in the middle of “The Odd Couple,” Babs, with the help of Meg, cleared all the dishes away and put them in the dishwasher, starting the last annoying mechanical grind before Dad’s white-noise box took over to drown out the sound of night crickets.

Still without a word of inquiry about India, Dad and Babs began to get ready for bed. Babs disappeared into their bedroom and Dad performed his last evening rituals: checking the home weather unit for wind velocity and barometric pressure; instructing me as to what lamps
not to touch or turn off because they were on automatic timers. Then he retired to Babs and his white-noise box.

Meg went to our guest room to read and I went for a welcome walk alone. I wandered in the warm night down the long country lane that led, if you followed it all the way, past the place of Mom’s death and on to the charred remains of Babs’s family farmhouse. Protected from fear and anxiety by the warm glow of alcohol, I wandered and staggered under the stars. Nothing could touch me now, and for a minute I even considered walking all the way to our old house at the end of Shady Lane to meditate on Mom, to try to see that night in July I had missed when I was in Mexico with Meg. But it was too far to walk and too painful to dwell on, so I decided instead to try to sneak into Dad’s pool for a naked swim. I had a feeling I could pull it off if I was real quiet and didn’t splash.

Taking my clothes off brought back the most delicious body memories from childhood, of running naked on summer nights under a full moon, running nude through the white statuary in the yard of the mansion across the street from my honeysuckle boyhood home. And I suddenly wanted to have myself and I rubbed my hands all over my warm naked body trying to surprise it with some foreign touch, some unexpected move.

I slipped into that heated pool and without a sound I swam on my back, looking up at the stars. At the same time I ran my hands down over my new body, my ass and thin thighs, as they opened and spread and pumped like some fully alive animation of those frog legs.

When I got to our bedroom I found Meg asleep with the light on. Her pixie haircut was still damp like a duck’s tail from her shower, and she looked fresh and innocent on the cotton sheets. She was almost a child again in my eyes, except for that one troubled blue vein that was slightly raised on her forehead. I stood there wondering how she could still go on loving me when I seemed to be doing all I could to drive her away.

It was a miracle, but I was able to sleep the whole night through, and even woke in the morning to one glorious moment of forgetfulness when only the delicious sensation of being wrapped in those cotton sheets was real. Then the panic set in again as all the crazy images of India, Ladakh, and Amsterdam swept over me. As soon as
I felt that anxious bale-of-wire feeling in my legs, I thought the best thing for me to do was get into the pool and work it out.

Dad and Babs had already been up for a long time, puttering and muttering. “Hi-ho, hi-ho!” Dad cried in his pretend faraway voice. Babs was, as ever, in the kitchen, rinsing the breakfast dishes by hand as she stared out over the still blue pool, then stacking them, completely clean, into the dishwasher.

“Good morning, Brew,” she said in her Rhode Island twang. I said good morning back to the both of them and staggered out to the pool, still slightly hung over and half asleep. Dad followed me out, asking, did I have the right towel? How did I sleep? What did I want for breakfast? Were Meg and I going to eat breakfast together? And did we want Babs to fix it for us? Did we want the bacon already made, in the warmer? This was followed by a numerical rundown of the morning readings of all the gauges in the house: air temperature, barometric pressure, wind velocity, and the temperature of the pool. Never once did he ask me what it was like to travel all the way to India and back. In fact, as I stood poised, about to dive, I realized that Dad and Babs still had not asked me one question about India.

A big splash and I was in the pool again, and for a moment I was also in the moment again. It was all just water and motion, and something I called “me” in motion in it. This was the only time I ever understood my boundaries, because the thing outside of me was so apparently different, so liquid, so other, so unlike those solid things, those people and lawns and cars and mountains and buildings and trees. It was such a great curative, this thrashing and splashing, and I wondered as I swam back and forth from one end of the pool to the other how would I survive back in New York City without a swimming pool.

The swim woke me up and brought me back to life and I managed to get through Dad’s living room interrogations about water temperature without much problem. In the bedroom I peeled off my wet swimsuit, dried myself with one of Babs’s prize fluffy pool towels, and slipped naked into bed beside Meg, who rolled over smiling, but when she saw my face hers took on a kind of worried look. She wanted to know what was wrong. I told her I’d just had a swim and felt fine;
but she knew that I was wired and hungry for relief through what she called manic sex.

“Please, Brewster,” Meg begged, “I just don’t feel turned on in your father’s house. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you noticed that by now? Let’s get up and do something productive. Let’s go wash and simonize the van before we go to the beach.”

“Oh, all right,” I said, groaning slightly, as I reluctantly dragged myself, semierect, out of the bed. “We can wash the car, but we can’t go to the beach because it’s the Fourth of July and I don’t want to see it. I just want to pretend this whole weekend doesn’t exist.”

Meg was in better spirits over breakfast, but I was groaning more. I was groaning between bites of toast and swallows of Babs’s dreadful instant coffee and Dad was hovering around me, washing and drying every utensil I’d put down on the table for more than ten seconds. I’d pick it up again and find it to my surprise all clean. Meg was reading the paper, oblivious (she had a way of falling into the news). After all of this, and a couple of Babs’s Camel regulars which made me cough and wheeze, Meg and I at last went out to try to wash and simonize the van.