“Charles is the painter. Remember?” she said. “He had a show of some sort in SoHo? I told you about it. Nan’s the sculptor; Walt plays in the jazz band. Deborah is the actress; she’s been in two films.”
Deborah had a small role in a movie we saw last Christmas, my mother said. The closest one to my age, Lauren, was studying in France. As an artist, she hadn’t defined herself, my mother said, “But she writes nicely. Like you, she’s got a good sense for people.”
In Lauren’s room, where they put me, there were piles of letters, diaries, and typed short stories, “The One-Eyed Jack,” “Lantern Night,” “Late Show,” “The Tall Man with the Purple Felt Hat.” Mostly, though, there were pictures. They lined shelves, covered corkboard: collages of the family in faded beachwear or thick, wooly sweaters, heads gazing forward over their folded arms, wild hair whipping back in the wind, on the boats, on the beaches, groups of them touring museums, walking narrow city streets, picking mussels in the fog. I tried to imagine my mother and me in those scenes on the walls. I felt as if something had passed us by.
Lauren’s bedcovers were white goose down and the floors were dark lacquered wood. On the blue night table was a photo album with handwritten captions about people. “Me and Nan in Paris,” “Charles after the ski trip…” “Bongs Away!”
When the house was empty, I dug around like an archaeologist. I raked over the CDs, the photo albums stacked in the corners, and flipped through the yearbooks, reading the inscriptions. On a bureau top there were pictures of Lauren in shorts and in a bathing suit, her legs tawny and long. It was strange to think of her as a relative; I looked at pictures of my new sister and I was hypnotized. It didn’t feel right and in many ways I was glad she wasn’t with us that month. I didn’t know how I would act. It’s a funny thing to meet a group of people older than you and be told that they are your family, you will live with them and not hate them or ignore them or fall in love with them. I stayed up late one night studying Lauren’s clothes and desk drawers and books. I found her diary and I read a few pages. What I read embarrassed me; it was about her and a boy in a field at night. I looked at her in a photograph and then at the boy in her album. I imagined them behind some trees in a darkened glen. I searched through her clothes for what she might have worn that night and settled on a thick gray sweatshirt, crossed oars on the chest, paint and grass stains flecked across the back. I threw it in my bag under my windbreaker.
For a while after my brother, Tim, died, my mother slept in his room, in his bed with the Buffalo Bills sheets. She kept his posters and papers and model warplanes intact. About a year later she moved back into her own bedroom and began throwing those things out. She swept through the house like a wind, cleaning, clearing, and rearranging. She said crisis was something you could turn around, you could make something positive out of it.
One time, while I was asleep, she put all our photo albums and my brother’s things in cardboard crates and carried them to the curb. She pulled the curtains from the window in his room, so sun would shine in always. She made the room her den. She went back to school for her master’s degree. She rode her bike to class and carried her book bag over her shoulders. In addition she took yoga, then tai chi. Early mornings when I looked out the window, I could see my mother crouching low, arms leveling out as if sliding across an imperceptible surface. She’d spend hours in the attic sculpting naked figurines, and then she painted our house with the same energy, inside and out.
When Tim and I were little, my mother forced her way into a group of fathers who organized Scout trips and fishing weekends. “I’m their father and their mother,” she said. She took Tim and me to football games and karate movies and professional wrestling and she feigned interest until we told her we didn’t like them, and then she found other things for us to do. We quit Scouts and went on our own trips. My mother consulted a field guidebook that showed how to coax a fire, how to pick edible berries and avoid the poisonous ones.
One time, under the full moon, she taught us how to howl like wolves. We’d pitched camp illegally at a lakeside summer camp a half hour outside of town, but the season had ended and there were no cars parked in the spaces behind the cabins or at the foot of the slate gray mess hall.
“Point your lips straight out like this,” she said, and from the side she looked, I remember, like a fish. “Oooooooo,” we moaned.
“That’s it. Now like someone’s dropped a box on your foot. Oowwww! Wooooooooooo. Put them together.”
“Jeez. We know what a howl sounds like,” Tim said. I swung my fist down hard on his foot and he elbowed me harder in the arm. “Oowwww,” we both yelled.
And my mother answered, “Wooooooooooo.”
Long after my mother went to sleep, we didn’t let up. We howled for hours until our throats were hoarse and our eyes burned for want of sleep. Tim’s howl was loudest and sounded like a moose call. Our joke was that there were moose heading across the lake from Canada because of Tim’s howl.
After Tim died, I had a dream we were camping, the three of us crammed into our tent along the lake. We’d zip the sleeping bags together, and our heads lay in a line, like bowling balls on a rack. We glanced over at one another or stared straight up at the roof of the tent, listening for bears or moose or a wolf. We heard them and saw their shadows run along the outside of the tent. They whined and growled and they poked shapes into the pea green fabric. But we kept them out with our voices. When I awoke once from that dream, I walked the house for signs of him. I stepped into his room and saw my mother there and we looked at each other with the same face of disappointment and I knew that she’d heard him in my steps, or seen him in the shadows I threw on the walls before I walked through the door.
Two winters after the accident, my mother took cross-country ski lessons. She saved her money and went for a ski weekend in Stowe, Vermont, with four of her classmates. They stayed at the von Trapp family lodge, the place the Sound of Music family moved to, and it was there that she met Norman.
He came to our house six or seven times after that for weekends or short vacations, but he never seemed at ease. Ours is a depressed area even by upstate standards. He made promises to us when he walked through the living and dining room — about couches and tables he’d buy for us, and trips he’d take us on. He praised the simplicity of our town but he meant something else. He meant it was no place to live.
The day we arrived in Maine, my mother and Norman disappeared into what they called the adult house, really just a separate wing with its own entryway. I saw them for short snatches in the mornings or before I went to sleep, but during the first two weeks I think I had only one meal with my mother. She and Norman took long trips on Norman’s boat and went out for dinner. Sometimes I’d run into my mother in the morning on a walk and we’d look at each other surprised, like former neighbors glancing at each other across a restaurant floor, friends that had neglected to call each other or stay in touch. She would say, “I’m sorry, but Norman and I need this time together, to get to know each other. It’s very important.”
Everyone had a routine. Charles set his easel up in the living room at sunrise and painted watercolors of schooners, yachts, and lobster skiffs. He blasted the Beastie Boys while he worked, and by one he’d finished. Walt squalled sax for hours in his room, but never before noon. His eyes were vein red and his room smelled like cigarettes. He taught me how to play a few notes but his mouthpiece tasted ashy, and my stomach pitched. Around sunset, Deborah read scripts in the big back bedroom with the light violet walls. I could hear her alter her voice, crying, laughing, or rattling in anger. Twice I read parts with her and watched her forget for a while who I was. Nan stripped furniture on the porch in those late hours and sometimes when I helped her we could hear Deborah soliloquizing through the window.