What We Have (16 page)

IT’S FUNNY HOW OFTEN PEOPLE
refer to place when what they’re really thinking about is time. “Remember Charlevoix?” my sisters and I sometimes asked one another. Charlevoix is the lakeside town in northern Michigan where we went on vacation every year until Sara went to college and we began to go our separate ways as a family. We hadn’t been back in almost fifteen years. My mother, angling for a reunion, was trying to get all three of our families to join them there next Labor Day weekend.

“When? ” Jacques asked, nonplussed.

“You have to plan early to get so many people together,” I said defensively, not wanting to hear my mother and her calendar lampooned.

Charlevoix. I loved the idea of going back there with Sacha. When I thought about Charlevoix now, I imagined the fossilized time of summer childhood: a white beach, a bucket of Petoskey stones, the low horn of the
Beaver Islander
—all associated for me with a time when we were young, intact, our parents in good spirits, summer flapping in front of us like a white sail.

We talk about things being “far off,” “distant,” and that winter, thinking about moving back to Boston, I realized that what I was picturing wasn’t a change in geography, but a move back in time. “Boston” to me didn’t really mean a new department or a new neighborhood, but Harvard Square, circa 1989: my favorite café on JFK Street, which used to be called Boylston Street (and before that—before my time—something else); running the bridges with Annie along the Charles; browsing on my hands and knees through shelves in secondhand bookstores. It was 1989 I was picturing more than Harvard Square, which had already gone through several separate waves of construction since we’d moved away. In 1989, there were no cell phones, or Internet cafés, and in every last area of my life, from romance to work, I’d been floating in an ether of anxious potential.

I used to read science fiction as a break from Donne and Milton, and there was one point that always got to people when they speculated about time travel. They called it the “grandmother question.” Suppose you could go back in time, two generations. You showed up in an earlier era, wore different clothes, spoke differently. You did various things, met people, life happened—and along the way you happened (completely by coincidence) to meet your own grandmother. Suppose one thing led to another, and you were the sort of person who did this kind of thing and you got in a terrible fight with her—maybe there was an antique revolver involved—and you ended up killing her. Then what? What would happen to your own mother—or to you? Could either of you still be born?

One group, sci-fi determinists, claimed to have the answer. If you went back in time and met your own grandmother, they reasoned, you could only act in predetermined ways. You wouldn’t be
able
to kill her—something would stop you at the last minute.

I had a different question: What if you could actually
help
your grandmother? What if you could keep her from dying young? Say, for instance, you could go back to the 1940s, take a train to Chicago, over to the near North Side, and let’s say it was a nice day, maybe in May, and you could go to the hat shop where Sylvia was learning to curl ribbon with a knife, and you just strolled to the counter with a beautiful hat you were thinking about buying, one of those hats you just can’t find in the late twentieth century, not even on eBay, and right before she reached over to wrap it up for you, you grabbed her hand—small, warm—and you pressed it, hard, and got her to look up at you. The two of you staring at each other, gazes locked. And you said, “Sylvia, I know this sounds insane, but listen. Listen! I know you’re feeling great right now, I know you’re a single mother, you’ve got a beautiful daughter, you’ve got other things on your mind, you’re not thinking about your ovaries, you love to go dancing, you have a closet full of dresses, but Sylvia, listen—”

What if you could
save
your own grandmother? What then?

It wouldn’t wreck the future. Your mother could still have her life. And you could have yours. Only better, in hundreds of ways.

Rewind, play backward. The ground opens up, the coffin lifts upward, the lid opens, Sylvia sits up, brushes her hair back, drowsy, a little stiff, starts to climb out, looking around her, confused. “Where am I?” Now you can play the tape again. Forward, but repaired. My mother turns nineteen, Sylvia is healthy, ruddy, they have dinner, Sylvia bakes the cake herself, they sing together at the table. My mother, able to be nineteen the way most girls are nineteen, rolls her eyes when Sylvia gets sentimental about how grown-up she’s getting. Afterward the two of them curl up on the couch together and make plans. They have nothing but time, sometimes they quarrel over insignificant things, make up, laugh, quarrel again. The pictures in our upstairs hallway change in a blink. Look: There Sylvia is, arm linked through my mother’s, and my mother has her mouth open wide, laughing. Forward, forward. Sylvia fussing over Sara’s bassinette. Lifting me from a swing. Oh, and there’s Pody with her. She looks older, my mother says fondly, with that isn’t-it-amazing-how-old-we’re-all-getting warmth in her voice. It’s wonderful how much older everyone looks. There’s a third act to the play, and a fourth. Gail is there, too. She and my mother say how glad they are to have each other, since neither of them has a sister. They all come to Michigan for Thanksgiving. We have to get more chairs, the table is so crowded! The cups fill to the brim, winking a little under the chandelier.

We don’t worry much, as a family. Not in this version: Family 2.0. Why sweat the small stuff, when you have your whole life in front of you?

In the real version—1.0—we worried all the time. About our bodies. About bad weather, terrorists, freak accidents. We called each other, asked how things were going. It was like we were always waiting. “For the other shoe to drop,” my mother said, and even though I didn’t know exactly what that phrase meant, I got the implication. We were waiting for the next worry—as if we’d know it when it came.

 

THREE DAYS AFTER I GOT
back from Boston, I got a call from the department chair offering me the job. Between appointments with the pediatrician, and Sacha’s first and second set of shots, and long phone calls with Annie and my sisters and my mother, and long nights up with Jacques, making lists of pros and cons and tearing them up and insisting we should just go with our gut, we decided I should take the job. Sad as I was about leaving Georgetown, it seemed like the best choice for us now as a family, and suddenly it was like we were rewinding the tape, taking things off shelves and putting them in boxes, emptying the fridge, recorking the champagne. We put our town house on the market, and soon there were always people over we didn’t know, opening up cupboards, inspecting the surfaces of things. With each visit, I’d put Sacha in her Snugli and walk up and down the steps in front of or behind the Realtors, defending the narrow stair-well, the distant nursery, the burn mark on our exposed brick wall.

The agents were unimpressed. The market was in a slump, and people with children—the bull’s-eye of home seekers—wanted detached houses. With garages. And yards.

Nobody had a nice thing to say about our third-floor nursery.

Then, just as suddenly, a couple in their fifties (children grown) came to look at the house, came back twice with an architect, and within days had made an offer. Not a stunning offer, but acceptable. They had all kinds of plans to “open things up” and knock out walls, and the agents thought it was a miracle. We signed the purchase and sales agreement and before we knew it, our house was on its way to belonging to someone else.

One Saturday Jacques helped me cut the royal blue carpet out of Sacha’s room with an X-Acto knife and roll it up to take with us. We also took some leftover blue-and-yellow border. I would’ve taken the exposed brick wall if we could.

March was a month of good-byes. We said good-bye to neighbors. To Dave and Lori. I said good-bye to the people in my department, to former students, to Dr. Weiss, to Dr. Lennox. We packed boxes. I started out with a great attitude and a neat outlay of supplies—fresh cardboard cartons, sharp scissors, boxing tape, permanent markers. This move, I told myself, was a chance for revision. In our new life I’d pare things down to mere essentials, everything would have its place. I stacked books neatly in boxes by author and subject.
Shakespeare. Seventeenth-Century Biography
. I still had no idea where any of these things would end up. Every Tuesday and Thursday when Jacques flew up to Boston, he looked at places for us to rent. All I could picture was my old apartment in Eliot House, with its green door opening onto the parking bay. Or Jacques’s little house with the pear tree.

“Back,” I said to Sacha, who pursed her lips in what I thought was an approximation of the letter
B
. “We’re going back.”

Through all of this, we packed, and then one Tuesday Jacques called, excited, and told me he’d found a place to rent. Admittedly, it was in the suburbs and not in Cambridge, but it was an actual house—detached, not even a town house—with three bedrooms, a fenced yard for Bacchus, and most importantly, no lead paint. That was a big deal. In Boston, landlords weren’t allowed to rent to anyone with children under the age of five if there was lead paint on the walls or trim. That law had knocked almost every place Jacques had looked at so far out of the running.

“Which suburb?” I asked. I knew Arlington a little.

“Newton,” he said, after a pause.

We’d made a pact, Jacques and I. Not Newton. Not that there was anything wrong with Newton—it’s pretty, full of trees, safe—but it seemed to both of us to epitomize suburban living, a leap forward into middle age. We weren’t there yet.

“Don’t worry,” Jacques said. “It’s just for a few months.” The plan was we’d settle in, using the rental as base camp. We’d find something permanent soon enough.

He brought a picture home, which I taped up on our fridge, like a focal point.

“Well,” I said judiciously, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s not that bad.”

“It has shag carpet on the first floor,” Jacques mentioned, as I centered the picture between the ice maker and the door handle. He frowned, inspecting the picture. “Kind of mint green shag, if you can picture that.”

 

FROM THE OUTSIDE, THE HOUSE
with the Green Shag Carpet looked like a child’s drawing of a house, a white box with shutters. We arrived late-week, late-March, during an early spring snow squall. Moving north, we seemed to have set ourselves back almost two months in terms of weather—it was like leaving the world of color and going back to black and white.

The house stood behind a neat front lawn in a row of other houses, closed up and immaculate, each with its own plastic can marked YARD WASTE. No people outside anywhere. Inside, each room was a perfect square. Every room on the first floor except the kitchen was carpeted in thick green shag—not a color I’d ever seen before, but one that my mother later nicknamed Donnagel Green, after the kind of medicine she made us take when we had diarrhea as children.

We only unpacked what we needed right away, stacking the rest of our boxes (
Shakespeare, Comedies; Ski Hats, Long Underwear
) in a side porch. Annie sent us an oven mitt in the shape of the Liberty Bell, which I hung up in the kitchen. This, Jacques reminded me as we trailed from room to mint green room, was just a place to park ourselves while we looked for something permanent. We wouldn’t be here long.

“What’s it like?” Annie asked, when I called to thank her for the oven mitt. In six years of grad school, she’d never been to Newton.

I tried to describe it.

The House with the Green Shag Carpet—eight miles from Cambridge, walking distance to no more than an Exxon station and a Star Market—was a distinctly middle-age house, with its wall-to-wall shag, attached garage, and swirly stucco ceilings. This was a house that smacked of trips to the hardware store, of Lysol and wind chimes, of mildew and old socks. The house had more space than we needed or wanted, and most of it we left closed up and unexplored: cedar closets for storing winter woolens, a mudroom, and the garage, where we found coils of rubber hoses and a pyramid of Ice Melt pellets. Mostly we huddled in two or three rooms, like campers avoiding the fringes of an unfriendly forest.

Unattractive as we were as potential tenants, given the lead laws and Bacchus, I knew the house was a windfall. It was for sale, which meant Realtors might intrude on us “once in a while” to show it, but—Jacques loved this part—it was a tenancy-at-will, which meant all we had to do was give a month’s notice when we wanted to leave. Of course, as I pointed out, that worked both ways. The owners (relocated to the edge of a golf course in the Carolinas) only had to give
us
a month’s notice if the house sold, lending a certain urgency to our house hunting.