Matters of Faith (6 page)

He could meet them soon, she'd said. But she wanted to meet his family first, and now they were proving themselves as surface and prosaic as he'd feared they would. They didn't understand how much he'd evolved over the past year, and now there was so damn little common ground. But then perhaps that's what Ada was trying to do with Meghan. He closed his eyes and let their conversation flow around him, praying the way she'd taught him, allowing himself to become still and allow the chaos around him to resolve itself without feeling the need to manipulate it.

It took so little time. In a matter of moments he felt able to re-enter the discussion, now centering around the one modern art class Ada had taken last semester. He listened to Ada and his mother circle around each other, his mother patiently explaining why Ada was wrong about something, some artist.

“I think you probably mean Graham,” his mother said.

“No, but that's a common misconception,” Ada replied. He nearly choked on a slice of strawberry.

“Really?” His mother's voice was low and pleasant, but Marshall heard the patient condescension in it. Ada didn't know, didn't realize.

“Smith's influence was really Xceron, but because they were both named John and both had been employed by Hilla, Hilla...” Ada faded off for a minute, searching for whatever name eluded her. Marshall thought his mother would rush to fill in the blank, to prove that she was the more knowledgeable after all, but when he looked at her he could tell that she didn't know the name either. He, Meghan, and their father watched the two women in silence, mouths not exactly hanging open, but close enough, amazed, not only at the fact that Ada dared to contradict his mother on an art point, but also that his mother couldn't seem to come up with an answer.

“Rebay!” Ada cried. “Hilla Rebay. Anyway, because they'd both been employed by her and had the same name, a lot of the American critics thought Smith was saying he was influenced by Graham, but really, he meant Xceron.”

“Wow. That's quite a conclusion,” his mother said, obviously unconvinced. Marshall felt his anger getting the best of him again. She always acted like she was so open to everything, but she was never open to the fact that perhaps she might be wrong about something.

“Let's look,” he said, rising from his seat. Four pairs of startled eyes turned toward him. “Should be easy enough to find. I need to check my e-mail anyway. Come on, Ada.”

Ada looked uncertainly at his parents, but then she rose, with Meghan leaping to follow, and they tramped upstairs to the computer in the attic office. It was an old, crappy desktop and they were still on dial-up at the house, but he hadn't bothered taking his laptop out of the trunk yet.

But he found what they were looking for in less than ten minutes, printed off the pertinent information, and the three of them entered the kitchen, triumphant.

His mother wasn't always right, and they had the evidence in hand.

I COULD have been angry when they showed up in the kitchen with their dossier detailing the intricacies of David Smith's Surrealist influences. And, indeed, from the evidence they presented it appeared that he meant John Xceron rather than John Graham. I'm sure I hid my irritation well.

And it wasn't the fact that I was proven wrong. It was the fact that not only did Marshall obviously feel such a compelling need to prove me wrong, but that the three of them, even Meghan, seemed to take such glee in it. I tried to recall my earlier expansive feelings, my willing embrace of
new
.

Ada smiled at me tentatively as Marshall and Meghan jostled each other around the kitchen. “Can I help you clean up?” she asked softly.

“No, of course not,” I said. “You're our guest.”

But she pushed through the swinging door and came back in with the empty hummus plate and the still half-full bowl of edamame in her hands, giving Marshall a pointed glance.

“Come on,” he said to Meghan, and they returned to the dining room to help clear the table. I gave Ada a little thank-you wink as she placed the dishes on the counter.

“That's a beautiful bowl,” she said, running her fingers around the pierced edge of the blue ceramic bowl my mother had given me when Cal and I married.

“Thank you,” I said. “It was my mother's. She always had it on her kitchen table, and now I always have it on mine.” I shook the edamame out of the bowl and into a plastic bag as she watched.

“I thought it was probably a family thing,” she said. “We had one exactly like it, my mom had it, I mean. She said it was her mother's.”

“Really? How funny,” I said, appraising the bowl, wondering how many women my mother's age had the bowl, if it had been one of those giveaways they used to do at grocery stores. I had never asked where my mother had gotten it, and I now envisioned thousands of them tucked away in a second and third generation's kitchen cupboards around the country.

“Does she keep it on her kitchen table?” I asked, making light conversation as Meghan and Marshall filed in with plates and silverware.

“Oh,” she said, flushing. “No, it disappeared a long time ago. We sort of moved around a lot, so I guess it got lost. She did, though, when we had it. I really liked it.”

She sounded so bereft for a moment that I actually considered handing her the bowl right then and there. But Marshall appeared behind her, his hands on her shoulders, and smiled at me over her head.

“I want to show Ada around,” he said. “Can we be excused from slave duty?”

“Marshall—” Ada began to protest.

“No, that's fine,” I said, waving them off. “Meghan and I can finish up here.”

“Mom,” Meghan started to whine, but quieted when I gave her a warning look.

I held on to Meghan in the kitchen, her back against me, my right arm slung around her chest, just above the soft beginnings of her breasts as Marshall and Ada headed out on their walk. We watched through the screen door as Cal accompanied the couple out to the road, veering away toward his outbuilding and leaving them to make their way, slowly, their arms wrapped around each other's waists, down the pine needle-littered street.

He led her away from the path that led to the beach and the romantic sunset over the Gulf of Mexico that was every Southwest Floridian's pride. Instead he veered toward the path to the bay, where the sunset would be muted, filling the sky with a light that made everything green glow, everything red a torch. It was less showy than the brilliant fireball sinking into the Gulf, but there was a softening beauty in it, and it was, for me and evidently for my son, even more romantic than the beach.

There were other advantages to ushering in the stars on the bay. I knew that he would show her the right way to leap from rock to rock to make it over to the tiny island without soaking her boots, would identify the wading birds that came out to feed, and might even be able to point out an alligator. And, of course, the real draw was that the bay was almost always empty of people, locals and tourists alike, at this time of day.

I watched them go and had a nostalgic longing for Cal to come gather my hand in his and lead me through the palms and pines, to find me an orchid in a tree, to guide me over a root or make sure I avoided a snake. I envied them their romance.

Meghan held no such notions yet and strained lightly against me. I felt myself tightening my arm before I let her go. She opened the dishwasher and began sliding our dessert bowls into their slots in the top rack, the way I preferred it done.

“So, you like Ada, don't you?” I asked, moving beside her at the sink to rinse and hand her the dishes. She reached up and turned the radio over the sink on, fiddling with the knob until she found the station she liked, moody, alternative. She bobbed her head as she answered.

“Yeah, she's cool. Don't you think so? And she knows a lot about a lot of different things. She said she'd teach me more sign language. And she said she'd help me research stuff, like my allergies. And she said maybe I could visit. Sometime.”

“Really? Well, I think you're a little young to go visit a college . . .”

“No, I mean when her and Marshall go to meet
her
family.”

“She and Marshall,” I responded without thinking. “When is this supposed to happen?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“This summer. Can I go?”

“Oh, sweetie, let's cross that bridge when we get to it, okay? I've never met her family, I don't even know...” I trailed off. Ada had communicated with Meghan. Perhaps all my less-than-subtle questioning had been directed at the wrong people all along. “Meggie,” I said, guilt flashing through me at my conscious use of Ada's nickname for her. Ah, see? New. I was getting the hang of things. “What has Ada said about her family?”

She slid the dishwasher rack in and manually lifted the door into place, yet another broken hinge in our home. “Just the same stuff she told you. They're really into, like, no chemicals and stuff.”

“Right,” I said. “I mean, what about their beliefs?”

“You mean their religion.”

“Yes. I suppose.” Meghan had grown up with Marshall's interest in religion, and she turned to me when she had questions. I always enjoyed our conversations. They gave me an opportunity to remember my parents and their interest in the world, their absolute willingness to discuss every theory as a possibility, and Meghan was learning to be inquisitive about life, which, I admit, I adored.

I loved having these two interesting children here, growing up on the backwater edge of the Everglades. Surrounded by people who'd lived here for generations, who made their livings from fishing or manual labor, it thrilled me to be raising children who could move easily in both worlds. It was vanity, of course, arrogance even, but I could not help but enjoy the thought that I was somehow diluting Cal's hard genes with my more genteel ones, making a lovely cocktail of children who knew how to think in abstract and didn't wince at getting their hands dirty or toughened by honest work.

I loved it when Meghan looked at me as she was looking at me now, thoughtful and curious, her brown eyes, flecked with the gold of her father's, pensive. “I think they're sort of like Kyle. I don't really know what the name of their church is, but it's, you know, their way of life?”

I nodded. Kyle, a friend Marshall had met his senior year in high school, had been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an interesting young man, but the friendship, for whatever reason, had been short-lived. I wasn't completely clear on all their beliefs, but at least I had some direction to go in. “Interesting. What makes you think she's like Kyle?”

“Well, he talked about healing and laying on of hands and stuff, and that's why she knows sign language, because she learned it before their church healed her sister.”

“What was wrong with her?” I asked, fascinated now.

“She couldn't talk, or hear, and she was sort of learning challenged, or something. But they healed her, I mean, the people in the church did.”

“She can talk, and hear now?” I asked.

“She didn't say, she just said they healed her. Do you think that really works?”

And here was where Cal and I differed. Cal would have simply said “no.” I didn't believe in absolutes. Who was I to say? I couldn't say that I believed it, but how could I say that it never happened? Because I'd never seen it? Because it wasn't widely accepted?

“I don't know,” I answered. “Wouldn't that be wonderful though?” I wanted her to see possibilities, to accept the right of others to believe what they wanted to, even if it wasn't what she, or her parents, believed.

She nodded, and then looked out the window, searching the driveway. “Ada said she'd watch
Heathers
with me if you let us,” she said.

Ah. This? Definitely
not
new. “Sorry, honey. We've discussed this.”

She sighed, a huge, precursor-to-teen-angst sigh. And that was when I knew that yes, this new was good. Because I did not feel dread well in me at the thought of Meghan turning into a teenager. Instead, I could not keep my mouth from curling into a delighted smile. I was looking forward to every bit of it, to seeing her change, and test her boundaries, and blossom—yes, I actually thought the word
blossom
—into a young woman I was going to be so proud of.

After Marshall and Ada returned we set up the Scrabble board in the living room, and when Cal returned from working in his outbuilding, he joined Meghan as a team. None of us were any match for Marshall though, who seemed lit from within, and this, too, I reveled in.

Cal and I left the children in the living room sometime after eleven, when Ada finally cajoled Meghan into playing the piano for her, and as we climbed the stairs he reached back and took my hand to the strains of Bach. We shared space amicably in the bathroom, and, as couples who have been married for a certain amount of time often do, there were enough allowances between us, an extra carefulness in passing the toothpaste, a courteous holding out of a face towel, that the path was being gently cleared for sex. This was the romance in our marriage, and, I believed, in most long-term marriages.

We laughed softly, talked softly, fell together softly, and then softly drew apart, aware of and pleased that this was one of the good times and our distance had been successfully breached once again. It was an aftermath with a subtly hopeful sheen, a small, quiet bit of promise.

 
 
CAL fell asleep quickly, but I was still awake when I heard the kitchen door open and close. I pulled one of Cal's buttery soft T-shirts over my head and padded to the window. Marshall, Ada, and Meghan moved in the moonlight like reeds, any difference in their build or sex smoothed out from this height. I could have opened the window, called down to them to find out what they were doing, but I felt too satisfied with my children, magnanimous in my newfound acceptance of them as young adults.