A Book of American Martyrs(47)
“But—but—what if the station wagon isn’t ready to be picked up when we’re back from lunch? How’ll we get home?”—this was Darren’s fumbling coup de grace.
“‘How will we get home?’—Darren, we live three miles away. There will always be a way to get home.”
In the rearview mirror our mother’s eyes flashed at us in warning yet still she was smiling. Her mood was cheery, ebullient.
How beautiful she seemed, to us! Before the ravaging.
Mom said that if the station wagon wasn’t ready when we returned from lunch, we could wait in the public library—“I want to go there anyway, to pick up a book. It may not be Ann Arbor but the library isn’t bad.”
So frequently our mother would preface a wistful remark with It may not be Ann Arbor but . . .
We’d lived in Ann Arbor long ago. To me, a lifetime ago.
Darren scornfully refuted most of my memories of Ann Arbor as mistaken, fraudulent. Especially I was eager to recall a place and a time where (we all knew, she hardly disguised her feelings) my mother had been happier. I had been born—(that is, I’d been told so)—at the University of Michigan Medical School Hospital where at the time Gus Voorhees was a physician on the staff; soon afterward, he shifted his interests to another kind of medical care, public health, community-oriented, female-centered, and we moved away. Of Ann Arbor I could remember little clearly except a vast, hilly park of hiking trails to which I’d been taken as a small child in a backpack on my father’s back—the excitement of those hikes, a pleasurable jolting like being rocked in a cradle, seeing the park spread out astonishingly before my eyes even as, so strangely, I was being carried backward . . .
Mom had hiked with us of course in this beautiful place they called the arboretum. And Darren too—I had to assume. Only vaguely did I remember him.
On the drive into St. Croix through open fields, past farmhouses and small clapboard houses dingy-white and cruddy (Darren’s most frequently used word) as our own, Darren shifted his shoulders and lanky-long legs in the seat beside me, and continued to fret, in an undertone meant for our mother to hear. At last she said, peering at him in the rearview mirror:
“Look, Darren—it’s my birthday, practically. I should get to do what I want to do on my damned birthday.”
“Your birthday isn’t until next week!”
Our mother’s blatant misstatements of fact seemed to particularly aggrieve Darren. At thirteen he’d become increasingly literal-minded, fussy and judgmental—not about himself but about the rest of us. Especially, our parents’ attempts at humor offended him, as if, in his ears, such humor was meant to obscure a harsher and more profound reality hovering like mist beyond the ragged foliage surrounding our house.
Our mother was saying, pleading: “Look. I’m sure that’s why your father wanted to have an ‘excursion’ today. He’ll be gone next week—to Washington, D.C. And he was away last weekend. Please just try to relax, Darren. You seem so—angry . . .”
Darren muttered what sounded like angry! Jesus and squirmed in his seat, kicking the back of the driver’s seat.
In our family there had come to be the tradition of the family excursion. These were sudden adventures planned by our father—usually impromptu, when a window of opportunity opened in his crowded schedule—involving a few hours snatched from oblivion as he liked to say. The family excursion had the air of the unexpected and the surprise; it could not ever involve any other persons, only the Voorhees family (two adults, three children); invariably it involved driving somewhere, as far as possible given restraints of time and common sense—once, to Houghton Lake; another time, to Saginaw Bay at Katechay Point. Rare that Gus Voorhees could take a few days off in succession—(more precisely, rare that Gus Voorhees would want to take a few days off in succession)—but when he could, and we didn’t have school, he drove “my brood” to Mackinac Island in northern Michigan where we stayed in a ramshackle cabin that belonged to relatives.
These were our happiest times. You would surmise.
It wasn’t often that our mother was so ebullient and funny, as she was on this day; not often that she smiled so much, and with such dazzle.
Except possibly, too much dazzle.
Our mother had made an effort to dress for this excursion. Not her usual flannel shirts, T-shirts, torn jeans, grimy Nike running shoes or, more often, at least indoors, no shoes at all; but rather the stylish lilac-colored linen suit purchased at a consignment shop in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham—(for Mom purchased most of her clothes at consignment shops, on principle: she was morally outraged by the prices of most clothes). She’d brushed and braided her almost waist-length hair, she’d “made up” her face. She has prepared herself to be beautiful for Gus Voorhees though she is (she knows: she accepts) not a beautiful woman but rather an ardent and intense woman who can (sometimes) convince a man (that man) that she is beautiful or, if she is not beautiful, that beauty does not matter: ardor and intensity matter.
Often there were times—days, weeks—when our mother did not smile much. When a smile from her felt like a rubber band being stretched tight—tighter. On the worst days of the interminable Michigan winter now behind us. (You did not ever want to think: yes, and before us, too.) On those evenings when our father didn’t come home for an evening meal because he was elsewhere, at another meal; or he was away altogether, in another part of the state, or in another state; he was “dining with” wealthy contributors (in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe) to women’s organizations, who happened to be (older, lonely) wealthy women for whom time spent in the company of Gus Voorhees was a thrill.