Pug Hill (32 page)

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Mrs. Gerard says to me right before she yells up to my mother, “Caroline! Why didn’t you tell us that Hope was single again?” My mother, now occupied with pointing out every sailboat we pass to Betsy, either doesn’t hear her or pretends not to. With a concerned tilt of her head, Mrs. Gerard turns back to me. I’m sure that if I listened closely enough to her, something which in actuality I will go to great lengths to avoid, I would be able to hear her making a little cluck-cluck sound. “What happened?”

“Uh,” I say, and as I say it, I know it’s long past the time to say that it was all Evan’s fault. I know it’s long past the time to explain that Evan was too critical and too in love with squash, and The Club, and the cold. In the end it doesn’t even really seem to matter that Evan loved all those things, along with Republicans, because when it came right down to it, he didn’t love me, and I didn’t love him.

“It just didn’t work out,” I say. I think how that’s really, given all the things I could say, the nicest thing to say. Maybe when I was with him, I wasn’t all that nice to him, like he said. So I say only that, and think that being nice to Evan in memoriam, being nice to him now, is better than nothing.

“Oh, I see,” says Mrs. Gerard, sagely nodding her head.

“What?” I ask, even though I know better.

“You’re just not ready.”

As we leave the protected cove, and begin cruising around faster through the open water of Lloyd Harbor, I am thankful for the noise of the engine. We pass all the beautiful houses right on the water, and even though we’ve all seen them so many times before, Dad points them all out, yelling loudly over the engine, “Look at that one, Caroline.” “Hope, look to your left.” “To your right!” Betsy’s barking is muffled, too, and I can see that Mom has one arm around her and is pointing out houses with the other. I think I can hear her saying, “Yes, Betsy, feel the wind,” but it’s entirely possible that’s all in my head.

I can feel Mrs. Gerard staring at me and I know that as soon as we stop she’ll be all over me and I look around, feeling very much like a trapped rat, and I try to plan my escape. As soon as we stop, I think strategically, I will head straight past my dad and Mr. Gerard and up to the front part of the Whaler and sit with Betsy and Mom. And that will be so much better. Even though Mom will slowly drive me to despair in her own way because she will be cooing to Betsy and pointing things out to her like the water, and other boats, and seagulls, and truth be told, no matter how old I am, when she does things like that it makes me feel very second-rate, and truth be told, I’ve never really gotten over always feeling like that because of Darcy.

“Look, Betsy, look at the seagull!” my mother shouts out, as if this has all been scripted long before I even got here, and I’ve always been destined to play some supporting character, the token surly, belligerent teenager. I am about to reconsider my plan. But one look at Mrs. Gerard, perching forward now on her seat, ready to pounce, makes me certain she is by far the worse of two evils. I feel the boat slowing down as we motor slowly into a cove. I brace myself. I get ready to make my move.

“Are you dating anyone new?”

I kid you not, the entire sentence is out, thrown at me like a lightning bolt, the second the engine is cut.

“Oh, you know, not really,” I say, “but I’m sure something will pop up soon.” I try to say this breezily, in what I hope is a nonchalant tone, in what I hope is a tone that says, “This is so not an important topic, and really, it’s rather boring, so let’s move on to something else, or better yet, let’s not talk at all, let’s just be quiet and listen to the water splashing against the side of the boat because that’s such a nice sound.”

“You girls today, you think it’s all a race,” she says to me. Mrs. Gerard, she does this, she sets you up so that she can say these things, these things she must think are wise and sagely along the lines of
my not being ready.
I would very much like to explain to Mrs. Gerard that I don’t think it is a race, and that if, indeed, I did think of it as a race, it’s a race I lost, a really long time ago. But what I want, so much more than to point out to Mrs. Gerard that her wise and sagely advice is as unwise and un-sagely as it is unwelcome, is to not have a conversation about dating. So I smile, and stand up, believing foolishly in my mind that there is actually an escape.

“Maybe,” she says next, “you just don’t know what you want?” and I am torn. I am torn between explaining something that I don’t know if I even have the language for, and just walking away, figuratively and literally, heading to the front of the boat and away from her. I opt for the front of the boat. I look in that direction, and realize sadly that the path is blocked. Literally, it’s blocked; Mr. Gerard and Dad have inexplicably gotten out some giant pile of rope and set it between them. It seems they are now engrossed in discussing it, as engrossed as Mom seems to be up there. “Betsy, yes, yes, that’s another motorboat.”

“No, I know what I want,” I say. I sit back down, because the boat is rocking now and the rocking is making me dizzy.

“What do you want?”

“What?” I say for no other reason than to stall for time. I look over in the direction of Mom, of Betsy, to see if maybe they’re going to step up, at any moment, and save the day. Mom is now just gazing adoringly at Betsy; Betsy is sitting with her tongue out, blissfully tired from all the wind.

“That’s quite a big pile of rope,” I hear Mr. Gerard say, and I think,
Yeah, it is.
I watch a seagull that is diving headfirst into the water, and the way he does it, I wonder if there might be something wrong with him.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Gerard says again, even though we both know I heard her the first time. Part of me wants to tell her that I’ve stopped believing in my ability to answer questions as big as that. She smiles at me again and I’m not sure it’s a smile anymore, I’m really starting to think it’s a sneer. And I know what she thinks my answer will be. I know she thinks it will be a way-too-long list, far too specific to ever be met. I know she’s expecting me to get all worked up in a dither, and say something really fast, something along the lines of,

“I want someone who would pick me up at the airport when I haven’t asked and I’m not expecting it, someone who would just surprise me, waiting right there at the gate, if he could get to it what with all the extra security these days, and I’d like it even more if he had to take a taxi to La Guardia or Kennedy or Newark to pick me up because he lives in Manhattan and might not have a car. Though, I think it would be nice if he had a car, though not for materialistic reasons but just much more so because one of my favorite things is being taken for long drives, and because I’m afraid of trains. I want what I’ve had, when it made me happy before, even though for whatever reasons it didn’t last. I want someone who likes art and who would never dream of referring to Christo as ‘that dude in the park with those flags.’ I want someone who likes books more than he likes football. I want someone who will make me mix tapes. I want someone who doesn’t think it’s weird and/or wrong that I’m a Catholic Jew or a Jewish Catholic and that really, I’m no religion at all so much more than I am both. I want a Unitarian Universalist. I want someone who cares about me and about something else, who cares about the environment and people and while he’s at it, social security. I want someone who is good at percentages, and someone who is good at tossing things coolly from one hand to another. I want a non-hairy chest. I want lanky. I want someone who will go to Woody Allen movies with me, and who, afterward won’t feel the need to talk my ear off about how Woody Allen was a better filmmaker years ago, but is rather just happy Woody Allen is still making films at all, and who will maybe say something positive about how nice the apartments were. I want Patrick Dempsey. I want Zach Braff. I want Joaquin Phoenix. I want Adrien Grenier. I want Jon Stewart. I want Ed Helms and I want Stephen Colbert. I want David Duchovny. I want Jason Bateman!”

But I wouldn’t say that. Besides for maybe the thing about the airport, I know enough now to know you can’t get that specific. Really, I think I want just what everyone else wants. I want love. And I want finding it not to be so hard.

I look out at all the sailboats, and I’ve always loved the sailboats, and I think that I want someone who would maybe take me sailing. I think I’d want that, too.

“Hope?”

“Uh,” I say, and I don’t want to tell her anything. But I feel, right now, like it’s so important that I tell her something, if for no other reason than to make her be quiet. I want to tell her something so that we can have silence, so that we can just listen to the sound of the water splashing against the side of the boat. Even if it is intermittently interrupted by my mother saying, “Betsy, look, look at the seagull,” at least it’ll be mostly silence, at least it’ll be mostly just the sound of water splashing against the side of the boat.

My eyes fall on Mrs. Gerard’s tote bag. There’s an elephant on it. I look closer at the elephant: it’s red, white, and blue. I look up and say, “I want a Democrat.”

Mrs. Gerard takes in a little breath, and then she doesn’t say anything else, and for just one moment I can hear the sound of the water splashing against the side of the boat.

Betsy starts barking and I try, for what seems like forever, to catch Mom’s eye. Mom looks over at me, and then looks over at Mrs. Gerard, and before she says anything, for this one really tiny, but really important moment, I feel understood. She turns to my father, and says, “Henry, it’s enough already. Let’s keep moving.”

I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun. I listen to engine sputtering as it turns over and at last, starts back up.

“Ready?”

It’s six in the morning and Dad is standing in the doorway of my room. Right, I remember, we planned this yesterday. Yesterday, after Darcy had arrived and everything had turned awkward, after we’d all spent the afternoon skating around the subject it seems we all spend a tremendous amount of time thinking of. But no one brought the commune up to Darcy, and she didn’t mention it either, which I have to say is something. But still, all the skating we were doing, it felt very much like it was on the thinnest kind of ice.

Of course a few times during the afternoon, I felt ever so compelled to point out that I just didn’t think that a person who arrived with a manicure and pedicure, a fresh set of highlights, and what looked suspiciously to me like quite a bit of collagen, was the same person who was going to pack up and join a commune. But I did not actually go so far as to point this out, ironically of course because Darcy
might
join a commune and because, as I may have mentioned, I have been labeled in my family as the judgmental one. And as Dad explained right before he went to the airport to pick her up, Darcy doesn’t need judgment right now; she needs support and love from her family.

And really, you might wonder, what does something like that leave you with? It leaves you with the fact that unless you want someone who’s never going to move to a commune to actually move to a commune, unless when that happens you want it to be on your head, unless you want to be the judgmental one who sent her to the commune, you better not be anything but nice. Regardless of whether or not the person to whom you must be nice spent the first three years of your life making you eat sand.

Darcy and Mom left to drive up to the Berkshires, up to Canyon Ranch, right after lunch. Later, at dinner, Dad asked me if I wanted to get up early tomorrow morning and help him with the new routine.

“New routine?” I’d asked.

“Yes,” he told me rather enthusiastically, “we’ve got a new routine now!”

“What time does it start?”

“Six,” he said, and I said that sounded great to me even though in truth, six pretty much sounds a touch on the early side.

“Great,” he said, happily. And here we are.

“Five minutes?” I ask without opening an eye. I hear Betsy gurgling, and I hear Annabelle snorting in the hallway and I think, from right at my father’s heels where he always likes to be, I might hear Captain panting.

“Five more minutes in bed, or five more minutes until you’re ready to go?”

I hear a soft thumping and I think it might be Annabelle dragging herself around the hallway on her stomach. I open my eyes and see that Dad’s in his sweatpants and his sneakers are already on.

“Five more minutes until I’m ready to go,” I say and I hear Dad leave the room. I marvel at how much harder everything feels at six in the morning, and I get out of bed.