The Love Children (32 page)

But I wouldn't want to work as a chef for Sonny, because I didn't want to cook the kind of food he served—hamburgers and French fries and chicken salad and bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. He served canned soup. That would not satisfy me at all, especially now that I was home and could use bones to make broth and was busy making delicious potato leek soup, cream of mushroom, cream of celery, or chicken broth with egg drop noodles—the Lithuanian, not the Chinese, kind.

So after a couple of weeks of waitressing, of being pregnant and knowing it, I called Dad.

It made sense. I needed shelter and someone who cared at least a little about my well-being. He was alone. He had land I could cultivate. There were lots of restaurants in his area that I could persuade to give me a chance. And who knew? He might be happy to see me.

He must have been a little sloshed when I called because he sounded as if he didn't know who I was. I told him I'd left the commune and needed a place to live for a while. Was he still alone? If so, could I come and live with him? He was sarcastic, his tone conveying the message, “So you finally call the old man. What happened, your mother throw you out?” I said Mom was going to France for two years. High dudgeon: what kind of mother is she, going off to Europe and leaving her child alone? Not remembering that I was twenty-two years old and had been, until the month before, safely ensconced on a commune.

I laughed. I said, “I'm a big girl now, Dad, but the thing is, I'm pregnant.”

That stopped him.

“Well, come, Jess, of course! Live here as long as you like, think of this as your house, you know how I am, I just eat and sleep here. You can live here and do what you like. It'll be your house.”

And so I went.

 

Dad's house looked unloved and uncared for. It was clean—his housekeeper, Mrs. Thacker, saw to that—but the straw flowers and pink bows looked dusty and tired. It looked like a house no one cared about. Houses can look that way, just like people—clean and neat, but abandoned. When Dad embraced me, he had tears in his eyes but he wasn't drunk. I hadn't seen him in three years, because he'd never visited Pax, although I'd invited him.
I drove to his house in the car he'd bought me, which by now was getting old, and he said, “Time we got you some new wheels.”

But I hadn't come back here to be Daddy's little girl. “When I can afford them, Dad. The car goes fine. I love it. It's enough that you're letting me live here. I really appreciate it.”

“Hey, you're my little girl.
Mi casa es su casa
. So how far along are you?” He surveyed my body, which of course showed nothing yet.

“Not far. I figure the baby will arrive at the end of January or early February.”

“And who's the daddy?”

“A guy called Stepan, who lives on the commune.”

“And what is he going to do about it?” He spoke peremptorily, the outraged father of a wronged innocent.

“He doesn't even know about it.”

My father opened his mouth to expostulate.

I put up my hand like a traffic cop. “No, Dad.”

He shut his mouth and stared at me.

I shook my head. “Let it be.” I walked away from him to gaze out the big window facing the lake. “God, it's beautiful here.”

“You're going to have this baby on your own?” he asked in a flat voice.

“No.” I turned to face him. “With your help,” I said.

His face changed; it grew softer and pinker, younger. “Well, that's a new one! I guess I can do that. Although it's really your mother's job.”

“She did it for me. You'll do it for my child.”

Did I imagine him puffing himself up? I walked over to the couch and sat down.

He bent over me, but only said, “How about a drink? You drink these days?”

“Not much. A little wine once in a while. But I'd love a Coke.”

“Comin' up.” He went into the kitchen, moving faster than usual. He came back with dark Canadian Club on the rocks and a Coke. He sat down across from me. And he smiled.

I smiled back. “You miss Julie?”

“Not really. She was a nice kid but a little tiresome. Silly. Something your mother never was. But much more agreeable than your mother.”

“You won't mind having me here? With a squalling baby?”

“I won't mind having you. About the baby I can't say, haven't laid eyes on a baby for—how old are you now?”

“Twenty-two. I'll be twenty-three next month.”

“That long. But I don't recall minding having you around twenty-two years ago.”

“I really need your help.”

“I'm in a much better position to help you now than I was then—young, broke, inexperienced, didn't know a goddamned thing . . . What do you need?”

“Well, a home. I'll get a job, so nothing else, except I'd like to plant some of your land.”

“What?”

“Yeah. One of the meadows. I've been farming on the commune, raising vegetables and herbs. I'm good at it and I love it and you will love the organic food I grow . . .”

“I'm not much for vegetables. You know, steak and a baked potato is my dish. What the hell is organic food?”

“A few years ago, a few farmers began to experiment with growing things without chemicals. American farmers spray their crops with toxic chemicals to kill bugs and fend off certain diseases. Nowadays we have huge factory farms, and farming is business. So, those of us who don't like this have decided to try the opposite.

“We are trying to raise vegetables and fruits without using any of those methods. It's called organic farming. It's good for
people and good for the land, and what's more, things raised this way taste better than the other stuff.”

“I haven't had a decent tomato or peach since I was a boy,” my father grumbled.

“Right. It's kind of a movement. There are only a couple dozen farms in the whole country that do this kind of thing. But lots of people are talking about it. There's a woman out in San Francisco, Alice Waters, who started a restaurant that's become famous, Chez Panisse. Her meals are supposed to be luscious and she uses locally grown products. She urges what she calls sustainable agriculture. She's my hero.”

My father was gazing at me. “Good, Jess,” he said finally. “Very good. Of course you can have a meadow. Whichever one you want. There are three.”

“The one facing Beaver Dam Road is the sunniest. And the most manageable for a tractor. Can I use that one?”

“Of course,” said my suddenly benevolent father. Then his brow clouded. “You don't expect to make a living raising vegetables, do you?”

“No, of course not.”

“It's a hell of a lot of work.”

“I know. What I want is to plant some herbs and vegetables and find a job cooking and eventually maybe open my own restaurant. Isn't that a neat idea?”

He sat back and blinked. “You always were a good cook. Like your mother.”

“Yes. I'm better now. I had a lot of experience at the commune.”

“Really.” He seemed impressed. Funny, because he never acted as if he thought about the taste of what he was eating or could tell good food from bad. And I never thought cooks were people he had respect for. I knew he respected men who worked with their hands building things or putting roofs on houses or
laying concrete, but he always acted as if Mom should be able to just rustle up whatever he wanted as if she was dialing a number. He always admitted she was a good cook; he just hadn't seemed to think there was much to cooking. My father respected only men—men who did manual work, who dealt with real things, material stuff, not ideas. He hated ideas, said they were pernicious. But I could feel, I absolutely knew, that he had suddenly developed respect for me, and it was because I could cook.

It made me feel terrific.

 

I settled in. I had brought all my stuff with me; I'd had to empty my closet for the French professor and his family. I brought whatever clothes still fit me, and some that didn't, and gave all the rest to Goodwill. I'd brought my books, my favorite pictures, my few pieces of jewelry, and my omelet pan. Dad helped me empty the car and carry everything upstairs, and then he went out to his studio to work. After I put my stuff away—there wasn't much—I went around my room grabbing the fake flowers and cutesy vases and pretty pink bedspread that Julie had put in there and tossed them in a plastic garbage bag. I rolled up the flowered pink rug she had bought and hauled out my brown and orange Indian rug from the closet and put it down. I stripped the cutesy curtains and left the window bare except for its bamboo blind. The only bright color in the room now was orange—in the globe of my desk lamp, in my Hopi rug, and in a small Aboriginal painting Dad had bought me when I was a girl. So the room was austere once more. It was beautiful. It amazed me that I cared. Maybe living for three years among the shabby remnants of Pax furnishings had honed my taste.

When I showed the room to Dad he just looked and nodded. “Funny how little it takes to change so much,” he said, standing there admiring it. I had the sense he knew exactly what had been taken away and what had been added. It seemed he did know
the difference between cutesy decorating and good taste, yet he hadn't done anything to stop Julie. I wondered how many things he'd kept silent about over the years, not just with Julie, but also with Mom and me.

He had changed. He was older—of course, so was Mom. But she still looked good, healthy and full of life. Dad looked yellowish—except when he was drinking, when he became flushed—and his body looked frail. Yet he was only fifty. It seemed to me that he drank less, or maybe he started later in the day. He also went to bed earlier, so perhaps he didn't imbibe the same quantity in a day. My sense was that he didn't get as drunk. When I was a kid, I used to think he woke up drunk, as if the residue never left his system and his body was always carrying alcohol from the day before. Something was different now.

After I fixed up my room, I asked Dad if he minded my redecorating the house.

“Be my guest,” he said. “It's a gift shoppe” (he pronounced this
shop-pey
) “now. A worn-out gift shoppe. Anything would be an improvement.”

So I went around the house, systematically removing Julie's embellishments. She had tried to create a home. She had been trying to do a good thing, but I couldn't stand it. Dad seemed to like what I was doing. He'd come in for lunch looking haggard and see me taking down curtains, removing slipcovers, banishing vases, figurines, artificial flowers, fake plants, and watercolors of children, dogs, flower arrangements, Vermont barns, and birch trees, and he smiled. And when I hung his paintings on the walls and put some of his things on the mantel and on side tables, his chest expanded. Collected over the years on trips with Mom and later with Julie, and stored in bookcases in his studio, they'd been for years haphazardly jumbled together, covered with dust: pieces of pottery and sculpture from Mexico, Venezuela, India, Inuit country, Africa. There were only about a
dozen pieces, but they reflected my father's eye, and they were gorgeous.

Once I stripped Julie away, the house looked terribly bare. She may have been kitschy, but she was alive and full of love, and without her or her stuff the house was neither. I'd looked down at Julie for her awful taste, but at least she had had some idea of how to decorate a room and I did not. Even with Dad's paintings hanging in it, his few collected objects placed around it, it didn't feel like a home. It was just a shabby place whose inhabitants had no idea how to live. The slipcovers had concealed the worn, torn fabric of the old armchairs and sofa, which Mom and Dad had bought used in the first place. Tables, shorn of their ornaments, were scratched and shabby; lamps without their fringed, bedecked lampshades were ugly and bare. I was befuddled; I really didn't know what to do to fix the damage I'd done. “What should I do?” I wailed to Dad.

“Go to New York and buy some new furniture,” he said.

Well, that was simple. He gave me a couple of credit cards and told me not to worry about what I spent. I took them gingerly, having never handled such things before. Credit cards had always been taboo for me, symbols of a way of life I'd rejected.

With guilty glee, I drove to New York City. And there I, the virtuous nonmaterial girl, the austere pure commune member, proceeded to betray my principles and my past, like the most shameless turncoat.

I had done some research. I'd called Alyssa to see where I could stay and where I should shop. She'd offered to accompany me, which would make it more fun. I went to town like an army tank mowing down the enemy. Did I enjoy it! I stayed at Alyssa's apartment, which she'd inherited from her sister (who had moved to France), and which had three bedrooms and five bathrooms. We walked out the front door onto Central Park West, and as she'd told me it would, a cab came cruising along within
seconds. At first I cringed inside when I handed my card over to the salesperson, but I was having such a good time that I forgot the joy I'd taken in planning my herb garden or making nettle soup. And best of all, Alyssa's going with me cheered her up, so I had the illusion I was doing a good deed.

Most of what I bought was Italian, and we had to wait months for it to be delivered from Milan. The main room was big, so I bought two couches and three armchairs and four table lamps and a standing lamp. In antique shops Alyssa knew that were sprinkled over the city, from Tenth Street to Madison Avenue to lower Broadway to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, I bought five tables of different sizes, shapes, and nationalities.

By the time everything arrived, Dad's Vermont cabin had the same feeling as the house in Cambridge, only more modern. It had an almost Shaker austerity, and I liked it very much. So did Dad. But the process humbled me; I could never again tell myself that I was pure or unmaterialistic. After the first wave of disillusionment wore off, I thought it was probably a good thing, because I had likely been using claims of purity to mask envy. I had been well on my way to becoming a self-righteous hypocrite. Now I could never again feel superior on the grounds of not being materialistic (and I'd probably never again have such a spending spree).