Let's Take the Long Way Home (10 page)

It took me years to grasp that this grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not its opposite. We learned to fight well and fairly from the beginning: When Tom witnessed one of our straight-on conflicts, he grabbed his book and headed up the stairs. “I grew up with sisters,” he said as he retreated. “I know where this is going.” We had great power to hurt each other, and because we acknowledged this weapon we tried never to use it. Besides the smoking, I don’t know that we ever fought about anything important. We could both be haughty and snappish and overly sensitive, and yet we forgave these traits in each other almost immediately and without much of a struggle.

Our trust allowed for a shorthand that let us get to the point quickly. Caroline knew that when I headed toward my basement corner of worldview melancholia, it manifested itself in ways both comic and treatable. For years a lovely young Guatemalan woman cleaned my house every couple of weeks. She adored Clementine and would regularly say, “Ooh, someday I’m just going to take her with me!” One afternoon after Lilian had left, when I was feeling assaulted by life’s little treacheries, I became convinced that she was serious. In a fit of maternal anxiety, I called Caroline, who knew Lilian and her sweet, teasing spirit. “Do you think she meant it?” I asked. “I mean, really, do you think she might take her?” Caroline was
kind that day—she neither laughed nor scoffed—but for years afterward, whenever I would start to go off-kilter about the world and its potential evils, all Caroline had to do for a reality check was say, with diagnostic calm, “I’m afraid Lilian is stealing the dog again.”

These were the day-to-day dramas we confessed to each other and lessened by their expression alone. Caroline would call fretting about a potluck dinner; she was so shy, she dreaded it for days. I told her to make an appearance and duck out early; she managed to stay for eleven minutes. She speeded me up when I dawdled, and I consoled her when her hyperefficiency got her into trouble, as when she plowed ahead into a parking garage and almost took the boat rack off her car. We divided the world up into separate strengths: I was good with computers and veterinary tasks; Caroline was in charge of home repair and any feat requiring physical strength. When it came to matters of the soul and psyche, we each knew how to tend to the other. But Caroline’s range of acceptance was larger than mine, and so were her skills of diplomacy.

PRIVATELY, AND NOT
altogether in jest, we believed that all people could be consigned to dog breeds. “God, he is
such
an apricot poodle,” Caroline would say about someone vain or entitled, or, between her teeth, about a woman who brayed:
“Beagle.”
Morelli listened to us
doing this during a walk one afternoon and stopped in his tracks; he had gone from amused to incredulous: “You guys are really serious about this, aren’t you?” This taxonomy became a code for human personality, and whenever anyone would wander onto our field of attention, the inevitable question became which breed he or she might be. We enjoyed making Morelli a chocolate Lab (great heart, sense of humor) and I insisted Caroline was a collie (smart, high-strung, loyal), but for years we pondered where I belonged. Finally one day at the beginning of a walk she declared her research over.

“I’ve decided what breed you are,” she said with dry certainty. I swallowed; this was important stuff. She paused before giving me the verdict: “A young female German shepherd dog.”

“Oh—but …” I was flustered and a little unnerved. “I mean, they’re really great dogs,” I said, “and I know they’re smart and everything. But they’re so
serious
. And they’re herders—they’re so bossy, they run every other dog into the ground.”

Her smile was her answer. “Well, that’s why I made you a young female,” she said. “To soften it a little.”

THE COMPETITION WE FOSTERED, ALONE AND TOGETHER,
became a pleasure rather than a hindrance: We brought our rivalry into the light and tried to tame it. Every time I swam, I chose a lane near an unwitting opponent, preferably a man, who was faster than I; then I flung myself through my laps for the next half hour, trying to catch him. Each October after the world-class Head of the Charles regatta, Caroline would go out on the water alone and row the three-plus-mile course, timing herself to see where she fell in her age and weight group. The race itself was too nerve-racking for her, and she didn’t care about competing publicly. Like me, she set an anonymous golden mean and raced against it.

Caroline always said that she and her sister had navigated their shared terrain by divvying up the goods. “Becca got math and science, I got English and history,” she liked to say, and we did something similar with our curriculum in the writing life: Our sublimation within
the safer realm of athletics allowed us to bolster each other professionally. According to our unspoken rule, Caroline was the columnist and I was the critic; she wrote about the personal and psychological, while I claimed the province of analysis and interpretation. It helped that I was older, and that we both loved our work and had been rewarded in kind. I think we were each good enough at what we did that we could applaud, mostly unequivocally, the other’s victories.

When one of us was the clear superior, it softened the odds—it took the pressure off the other’s Inner Marine. You will
always
be the better rower, I told her one summer, with relief; that meant I could actually relax and let her train me. And rowing was the shared Eden that allowed us unbridled effort and victory, whatever the race. Caroline’s willowy prowess on the water testified to years of work, and she took unabashed pride in this accomplishment: One of life’s grace notes had been the morning when Harry Parker, legendary oarsman and Harvard crew coach, spotted Caroline on the river and gave her a thumbs-up in front of his amateur eights, then had her demonstrate her stroke. In winter, desolate at the long season when the river was frozen, Caroline retired to the gym, where she had been known to do stomach crunches with a ten-pound weight on her chest. Weaker but only slightly less fanatical, I nearly killed myself trying to do the plough (a contortionist’s back stretch) on my kitchen floor, simply because Caroline had shown it to me that
afternoon on the asphalt path at Fresh Pond. In the offseason, I joined Gold’s Gym, listening to the male weight lifters make primate noises while I suffered through a half hour on the indoor rowing machines. Walking the icy trails of January, we fantasized about winter-sport possibilities: Was it too late in life to take up the luge? By the time New England’s erratic spring arrived, we were pawing the ground like crazed horses. We knew that thrashing around on the water during a cold and windy March could be frustrating and even foolish.

But within a year after that first summer at Chocorua, where Caroline had shown me the fire, I also knew there was no such thing as a bad row. It opened up the world in such powerful and quotidian ways that the promise of it, whether in February or August, gave us a calendar by which to mark our passion. From my first full season on the water, Caroline indulged my fervor with fond recognition of what she had been through years before. If the water was perfect—glassy and still—we would drop anything (dentist appointments, dinner obligations) to get on the river. I often went out in early evening, when the wildlife had settled and the shoreline had gone from harsh brightness to Monet’s gloaming, and then I would row back to the dock in golden light, the other scullers moving like fireflies across the water.

My stubbornness and upper-body strength compensated for my weak leg, and within a couple of seasons I had managed a passable stroke. I got stronger, faster, exhilarated
on a daily basis. I went out in wind gusts and rain and came back spent and calm. Caroline had warned me that my entire relationship to the river would change, and to be careful driving—with the Charles River winding alongside Memorial Drive, it was easy to forget about oncoming traffic if you were rubbernecking the condition of the water. “The river will become a character in your life,” Caroline told me. “You’ll be amazed how much influence it will have on your day.”

By autumn, I had mapped out an entire country of flora and fauna, much of it invisible from land. I began to set my internal clock of miles logged by the landmarks I encountered. There was the man who played bagpipes each morning on a bend in the river—“The Halls of Montezuma” and, if I was lucky, “Amazing Grace”—and the muskrat a quarter mile upstream, appearing with such reliability that I could believe it was for my benefit. (There was also, less decorous, the exhibitionist on the wooded end of the river who flashed women rowers, about whom Caroline had warned me.) Most of all there was the arc and geography of the river and my place upon it. By September the goslings of spring would be learning to dive on their own; the marshes had turned from green to golden rose. All of it offered a palette in time and space where beauty was anchored to change.

I usually saw Caroline on her way upriver: the blond ponytail, the back of a dancer, a stroke as fluid as it was exact. (She never saw me until I called out to her, and
even then she had to squint. The glasses she needed and refused to wear never left the glove box of her car.) Some days we would meet on a wide stretch by the finish line of the Head of the Charles. The moment she squared her blades and stopped, Caroline checked her watch, sometimes surreptitiously; even on the gentlest of rows, she was gauging her time. Then she would watch my stroke and give me a drill to occupy me for a few days. “Use your abs for the recovery,” she would say. “Stop checking behind you; you’re clear. Use your thumbs before you feather!” I thrilled to the language as well as the instruction.

In the summer of 2000, when I was forty-nine and Caroline was about to turn forty-one, we decided that we had one last chance to realize a dream: to row in a double in our age division in the Head of the Charles. We were mistaken about the age stipulation, which accepts any pairing with an age average over forty, but the fantasy stuck, and it gave us a mission for the season. It was the sort of goal we both loved, one that we could discuss endlessly while incorporating its training demands into our daily routines. Because we both fell into the under-130-pound weight division, we decided that we would bill ourselves as the Literary Lightweights—good for a few laughs on the river, we thought, and maybe even a corporate sponsor or two. Morelli, who had long wanted Caroline to show her stuff in a race, had T-shirts made for us with a tiny oarsman on the breast; he promised to
hang off the bridges and photograph us during training sessions. As the more accomplished rower, Caroline would steer while I rowed stroke, which meant that she would have to slow her pace to mine.

This handicap was of no consequence to her and mattered greatly to me. I added stomach crunches and leg lifts to my regimen, and started taking my pulse after sprints on the water. I plied Caroline with progress reports: stroke rate, heart rate, technical or psychic breakthroughs. She endured my single-mindedness and placated me when she could. “I’m afraid I’ll fail you,” I said one day, with great seriousness; my German shepherd spirit at the ready, I had already turned a lark into a challenge of enormous weight.

“I will
only
do this with you if it can be fun,” she told me, and my antennae went up. “Fun” was a nebulous concept for both of us; her therapist was always trying to impose it on her. Fun was far more difficult to get a handle on than zeal. But I listened to her that day and tried to bank my fires, and eventually my training rituals became an end unto themselves.

We missed the entrance for our division that year, which for first-timers is decided by lottery. I think we were both relieved, for two reasons. One was that we had started training late in the season and weren’t ready to race. The other, more revealing reason was that Caroline and I were each so goal-oriented—she once told me that “mastery” was her favorite feeling—that we wanted the
next season, and the next, to have an occasion to set our hopes and focus toward. Like most odysseys, ours on the Charles was more about the journey than the finish line. The metaphor of rowing may have been what we loved the most: the anticipation, the muscles spent and miles logged, the September harvest moon. Because we both possessed that single trait that makes a lifelong rower—endurance—we declared that we would row the Head together in our seventies, when the field had thinned sufficiently to give us a fighting chance. The fantasy would fuel us for two more winters.

After the 2000 regatta had come and gone, in late October, we took out the double to see how we might have measured up. It was a fiasco from the start: The boat had been rigged for giants, which meant that we were half prostrate during a full stroke; we didn’t realize this mechanical mishap until we were too far out on the water to make adjustments. The wind picked up, accompanied by haphazard gusts that made the river a sea of chop. Then the rain started—a cold autumn rain that pelted us from behind and threatened our nerves as well as our grip on the oars. Caroline responded to these horrid conditions by rowing harder. My stroke grew ragged and then uneven, until she finally told me to stop rowing altogether; if my rhythm was too far off, she would be battling against me. Frustrated by my own performance, I was in awe of hers: The worse the rain and the stronger
the current, the steadier she became. We rowed the entire course, cheering as we crossed a deserted finish line. We were soaked from rain and waves, elated from laughter and exertion. I lay back in the boat and let Brutita row us home.

THAT DECEMBER, A BLIZZARD STRANDED ME FOR
days in Texas, where I had gone to see my family for the holidays. I finally managed to get on a flight that was rerouted through Chicago to Massachusetts. Caroline, in touch by phone during the ordeal, had taken Clementine to my apartment an hour before my flight was scheduled to arrive in Boston. At the end of a marathon travel day, I sank into the back of a cab at Logan Airport, wanting nothing more than to be in my own home, wanting my couch and the feel of Clementine’s ruff and the sound of Caroline’s voice on the phone. “Hostage to attachment,” I remember thinking, the words coming out of nowhere. Leaving town was what told me, reminded me, how much I relied on these two creatures to give purchase to the emotional ground of my life. If by now this realization was more consoling than unnerving, it was still a radical departure from my norm. However skittish Caroline could be, I may have been worse—more stubborn,
more reflexively prideful—when the real bruisers of life showed up. In crisis, I circled my wagons, more afraid of being disappointed by someone than of going it alone.