The Best of Me(25)
What would ultimately last were these fifteen minutes on the coastal highway, but we didn’t know that then. When older, even the crankiest of us would accept them as proof that we were once a happy family: our mother young and healthy, our father the man who could snap his fingers and give us everything we wanted, the whole lot of us competing to name our good fortune.
The house was, as our parents had promised, perfect. This was an older cottage with pine-paneled walls that gave each room the thoughtful quality of a den. Light fell in strips from the louvered shutters, and the furniture, which was included in the sale, reflected the taste of a distinguished sea captain. Once we’d claimed bedrooms and lain awake all night, mentally rearranging the furniture, it would be our father who’d say, “Now hold on a minute, it’s not ours yet.” By the next afternoon he had decided that the golf course wasn’t so great after all. Then it rained for two straight days, and he announced that it might be wiser to buy some land, wait a few years, and think about building a place of our own. “I mean, let’s be practical.” Our mother put on her raincoat. She tied a plastic bag over her head and stood at the water’s edge, and for the first time in our lives we knew exactly what she was thinking.
By our final day of vacation our father had decided that instead of building a place on Emerald Isle, we should improve the home we already had. “Maybe add a pool,” he said. “What do you kids think about that?” Nobody answered.
By the time he’d finished wheedling it down, the house at the beach had become a bar in the basement. It looked just like a real bar, with tall stools and nooks for wine. There was a sink for washing glasses and an assortment of cartoon napkins illustrating the lighter side of alcoholism. For a week or two my sisters and I tottered at the counter, pretending to be drunks, but then the novelty wore off and we forgot all about it.
On subsequent vacations, both with and without our parents, we would drive by the cottage we had once thought of as our own. Each of us referred to it by a different name, and over time qualifiers became necessary. (“You know, our house.”) The summer after we didn’t buy it, the new owners—or “those people,” as we liked to call them—painted The Ship Shape yellow. In the late seventies Amy noted that The Nut Hut had extended the carport and paved the driveway. Lisa was relieved when the Wait ’n’ Sea returned to its original color, and Tiffany was incensed when The Toothless Black Man Selling Shrimp from the Back of His Van sported a sign endorsing Jesse Helms in the 1984 senatorial campaign. Four years later my mother called to report that The Sandpiper had been badly damaged by Hurricane Hugo. “It’s still there,” she said. “But barely.” Shortly thereafter, according to Gretchen, The Shell Station was torn down and sold as a vacant lot.
I know that such a story does not quite work to inspire sympathy. (“My home—well, one of my homes—fell through.”) We had no legitimate claim to self-pity, were ineligible even to hold a grudge, but that didn’t stop us from complaining.
In the coming years our father would continue to promise what he couldn’t deliver, and in time we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire. He’d never get the part but liked the way that the words felt in his mouth. “What do you say to a new car?” he’d ask. “Who’s up for a cruise to the Greek Isles?” He expected us to respond by playing the part of an enthusiastic family, but we were unwilling to resume our old roles. As if carried by a tide, our mother drifted farther and farther away, first to twin beds and then down the hall to a room decorated with seascapes and baskets of sun-bleached sand dollars. It would have been nice, a place at the beach, but we already had a home. A home with a bar. Besides, had things worked out, you wouldn’t have been happy for us. We’re not that kind of people.
The Girl Next Door
“Well, that little experiment is over,” my mother said. “You tried it, it didn’t work out, so what do you say we just move on.” She was dressed in her roll-up-the-shirtsleeves outfit: the faded turquoise skirt, a cotton head scarf, and one of the sporty blouses my father had bought in the hope she might take up golf. “We’ll start with the kitchen,” she said. “That’s always the best way, isn’t it.”
I was moving again. This time because of the neighbors.
“Oh, no,” my mother said. “They’re not to blame. Let’s be honest now.” She liked to take my problems back to the source, which was usually me. Like, for instance, when I got food poisoning it wasn’t the chef’s fault. “You’re the one who wanted to go Oriental. You’re the one who ordered the lomain.”
“Lo mein. It’s two words.”
“Oh, he speaks Chinese now! Tell me, Charlie Chan, what’s the word for six straight hours of vomiting and diarrhea?”
What she meant was that I’d tried to save money. The cheap Chinese restaurant, the seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment: “Cut corners and it’ll always come back to bite you in the ass.” That was one of her sayings. But if you didn’t have money how could you not cut corners?
“And whose fault is it that you don’t have any money? I’m not the one who turned up his nose at a full-time job. I’m not the one who spends his entire paycheck down at the hobby shop.”