He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside him in the sheets.
His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish, humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.
On Caroline’s nightstand was a hardcover copy of Middle Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had (Caren Tamkin, Ph.D., 1998).
She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly visible through the fabric’s stretched weave …
When he reached out and smoothed her hair, her entire body jerked as if the hand were a defibrillator paddle.
“What’s going on here?” he said.
“My back is killing me.”
“An hour ago you were laughing and feeling great. Now you’re sore again?”
“The Motrin’s wearing off.”
“The mysterious resurgence of the pain.”
“You haven’t said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back.”
“Because you’re lying about how you hurt it,” Gary said.
“My God. Again?”
“Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that’s not the problem. It’s the ringing phone.”
“Yes,” Caroline said. “Because your mother won’t spend ten cents to leave a message. She has to let it ring three times and then hang up, ring three times and then hang up—”
“It has nothing to do with anything you did,” Gary said. “It’s my mom! She magically flew here and kicked you in the back because she wants to hurt you!”
“After listening to it ring and stop and ring and stop all afternoon, I’m a nervous wreck.”
“Caroline, I saw you limping before you ran inside. I saw the look on your face. Don’t tell me you weren’t in pain already.”
She shook her head. “You know what this is?”
“And then the eavesdropping!”
“Do you know what this is?”
“You’re listening on the only other free phone in the house, and you have the gall to tell me—”
“Gary, you’re depressed. Do you realize that?”
He laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re brooding, and suspicious, and obsessive. You walk around with a black look on your face. You don’t sleep well. You don’t seem to get pleasure out of anything.”
“You’re changing the subject,” he said. “My mother called because she had a reasonable request regarding Christmas.”
“Reasonable?” Now Caroline laughed. “Gary, she is bonkers on the topic of Christmas. She is a lunatic.”
“Oh, Caroline. Really.”
“I mean it!”
“Really. Caroline. They’re going to be selling that house soon, they want us all to visit one more time before they die, Caroline, before my parents die—”
“We’ve always agreed about this. We agreed that five people with busy lives should not have to fly at the peak holiday season so that two people with nothing in their lives wouldn’t have to come here. And I’ve been more than happy to have them—”
“The hell you have.”
“Until suddenly the rules change!”
“You have not been happy to have them here. Caroline. They’re at the point where they won’t even stay for more than forty-eight hours.”
“And this is my fault?” She was directing her gestures and facial expressions, somewhat eerily, at the ceiling. “What you don’t understand, Gary, is that this is an emotionally healthy family. I am a loving and deeply involved mother. I have three intelligent, creative, and emotionally healthy children. If you think there’s a problem in this house, you better take a look at yourself.”
“I’m making a reasonable proposal,” Gary said. “And you’re calling me ‘depressed.’”
“So it’s never occurred to you?”
“The minute I bring up Christmas, I’m ‘depressed.’”
“Seriously, are you telling me it’s never occurred to you, in the last six months, that you might have a clinical problem?”
“It is extremely hostile, Caroline, to call another person crazy.”
“Not if the person potentially has a clinical problem.”
“I’m proposing that we go to St. Jude,” he said. “If you won’t talk about it like an adult, I’ll make my own decision.”
“Oh, yeah?” Caroline made a contemptuous noise. “I guess Jonah might go with you. But see if you can get Aaron and Caleb on the plane with you. Just ask them where they’d rather be for Christmas.”
Just ask them whose team they’re on.
“I was under the impression that we’re a family,” Gary said, “and that we do things together.”
“You’re the one deciding unilaterally.”
“Tell me this is not a marriage-ending problem.”
“You’re the one who’s changed.”
“Because, no, Caroline, that is, no, that is ridiculous. There are good reasons to make a one-time exception this year.”
“You’re depressed,” she said, “and I want you back. I’m tired of living with a depressed old man.”
Gary for his part wanted back the Caroline who just a few nights ago had clutched him in bed when there was heavy thunder. The Caroline who came skipping toward him when he walked into a room. The semi-orphaned girl whose most fervent wish was to be on his team.
But he’d also always loved how tough she was, how unlike a Lambert, how fundamentally unsympathetic to his family. Over the years he’d collected certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance:
You’re nothing at all like your father.
You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW.
Your dad emotionally abuses your mom.
I love the taste of your come.
Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life.
Let’s buy both!
Your family has a diseased relationship with food.
You’re an incredibly good-looking man.
Denise is jealous of what you have.
There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering.
He’d subscribed to this credo for years and years — had felt deeply indebted to Caroline for each remark — and now he wondered how much of it was true. Maybe none of it.
“I’m calling the travel agent tomorrow morning,” he said.
“And I’m telling you,” Caroline replied immediately, “call Dr. Pierce instead. You need to talk to somebody.”
“I need somebody who tells the truth.”
“You want the truth? You want me to tell you why I’m not going?” Caroline sat up and leaned forward at the funny angle that her backache dictated. “You really want to know?”