With the keys from a shyly smiling Sugar (in her colorful West Indian-style head kerchief), we drove back to the house. As we walked up the concrete steps my father had molded and poured himself when I was eight, opened the outside screen, and turned the old-fashioned key in the brass lock on the white door, I found everything, from the sound of the hinges to — once we stepped in — the smell of the rag rug before the hearth, achingly familiar.
Edward and I began to explore.
There was a kitchen cabinet full of thick white soup plates (out of which I’d eaten my mother’s chili when I was five) and a drawer full of bamboo place mats (which I used to hold up to my face and stare through into the striated sunlight — I lifted one now, and, even though they were wholly dry, they still gave off the same wet woody smell). My father’s stuffed pheasant was still mounted on the living room’s knotty pine wall, and the sepia print of Joe Louis fighting Billy Conn still hung over the mantel in the birch frame I’d watched Dad nail together when I was too young to know my age. In the blue bureau’s second drawer (a few flaked spots told of the years when the whole had been painted red) lay, folded into a rounded oblong, my check-style army blanket in its two unnameable shades of tan (baked bean on dusky sweet potato?), the corner, as I lifted it, bearing a small name tape, sewn neatly on both sides, “Sam Delany,” from one summer at hideous Hill-and-Dale, or from another at wonderful Woodland. Lined up in front of still another kitchen drawer were the half dozen joined salt-and-pepper shakers on their pewter bases with the black-and-white spring-release mechanisms, which, for years, had sat out on the enameled gray porch tables at my Uncle Myles’s house at Greenwood Lake, but which had somehow — probably a nostalgic gesture of my mother’s, when Aunt Dorothy, on selling their summer house, was going to throw them out with the mangy deerskin and the old wooden rack of poker chips and the brown ceramic jug with the little man’s head on the cork and the music box in the base that had once played “Show Me the Way to Go Home”—ended up here, in our kitchen drawer, beside our aluminum summer sink.
Turning on the water and electricity (now a trip to the earth-smelling cellar, now one to the resin-rich attic) took only half an hour.
The sky outside the window was going blue behind the birch trees. We’d had a big lunch before we’d left. Neither of us was particularly hungry. “Why don’t we walk down to Kaplan’s?” Edward suggested.
“And get some comics,” I added.
Which made Edward laugh — because that’s what we’d have done when we’d been here at nine, at twelve, at fourteen.
We left the house, walked down the all-but-bare cinder drive to the highway, then strolled up the shoulder the mile to the filling station and Kaplan’s, with the big floor fan still standing and humming in the corner by the prescription counter.
We looked at comics, bought ice cream sodas, walked around outside, went behind the building (which I had never done before), and saw black oil drums sitting in the tall weeds, bought a few things from the grocery next door, then went in again, and said good-night to Mr. Kaplan (“Now you give my best to your mother, when you see her. It’s so sad about your father. So sad. He was such a gentle man.”), who really did look a lot older.
When we started back up the highway (I was holding the brown grocery bag in one arm), it was cool. The sky was a deep blue, two stars already showing, and only minutes from full night — which overtook us while we walked.
I don’t know what we were talking about — perhaps the conversation had fallen to a halt.
When the headlights loomed up the road, I squinted. They veered closer — first I stopped; then, when I realized they were coming right at me, I jumped at the same time Ed pulled me to the side. (The grocery bag fell.) Under a highway light on a pole right by us, the door handle flashed its chrome not ten inches from my hip, as the car — its tires yowling now — swerved back toward the other side of the highway. We both whirled to watch, not breathing.
The car swung around sideways. The wheels flipped up, showing the crisscrossed struts of the base, and the car came to rest on its roof, wheels to the stars, some twenty-five yards down the road.
“Jesus Christ …!” I whispered. My heart thudded.
Edward said: “Nobody’s alive in that …!”
I was wondering if it was going to go up.
But Edward said, “We better go see, though.”
We sprinted toward the inverted wreck.
As we got there, just beyond another tin-shaded road light high on a phone pole, we saw an arm, with a large cuff link and sports jacket, reach out the window and feel around in the green and icy splatter of window glass. Then a head stuck out — glasses askew.
Edward squatted down to help the man. “You all right?” he asked.
I gave a hand, expecting the guy to gasp any moment from the pain of a broken leg, a shattered hip. But he got free of the upside-down car, stood up, and began to beat dust from his slacks. A pudgy white guy, maybe twenty-five or thirty, he shook his head once, adjusted his glasses, and said, “What a bitch!” He shook his head again, stepping around a little unsteadily. “What a bitch, man! What a bitch!” He made a disgusted gesture at the upside-down machine. “Best fuckin’ car I ever owned too!” He looked at Edward, at me. “Now can you believe that? Best fuckin’ car I ever owned! What a bitch!”
“You all right?” Edward asked again.
“Maybe you better sit down,” I said.
“What a bitch!” the man repeated, and looked again, disgustedly, back at the car.
Lights had gone on in one of the near houses, and a woman came out. While the driver paced and cursed, Edward reached in to turn on the headlights, which were generally pointed up the road. The woman went in to get a red emergency light, to phone someone.
Finally we started back toward the house — I picked up the grocery bag. Once we were around the next curve, Edward finally began to laugh. Soon we were both in hysterics. “In a minute it’s going to hit him what he just went through,” I said, “and he’s gonna piss on himself!”
“He’s one lucky son of a bitch!” Edward said.
We began to laugh again.
22.2. The country visit a week later is much less clear. I remember making a sixteen-inch aluminum skillet full of scrambled eggs, over the electric stove’s nested cherry rings; they took far longer to set than I’d expected.
I recall Nanny and Walter waking in the daybed, under white chenille, against the living room’s knotty pine wall; and Baird and Margie walking together toward the house through the tall grasses down the hill; and twenty-two-year-old Edward sitting down in the ancient backyard swing, with flakes of red paint still on the pipe frame, to take a great pumping kick, and the thing almost turning over — he leaped off just in time.
I remember going with Marilyn to look at the abandoned foundation that sat behind the row of pines we’d planted to hide it along the edge of our property. Half fallen in now, it was all but a garbage dump. There was an old and complex story about the place, full of strain among friends and family, with betrayals and bad feelings. The final turn of the screw was that the woman who’d never been able to complete the house on the land that no one had wanted her to have anyway had finally gone mad and was in an asylum somewhere. That, at any rate, was the tale. I remember staring up through the leaves of the bushy red maple Dad had planted in the front yard as a two-foot sapling (“Now this is going to be your tree. …”) and once I stepped outside the kitchen screen, all dappled with sun, to look at the bench we’d built between the two trees out back. A plank had been painted red, nailed to two three-inch posts driven in the ground, and the ends nailed to pieces of wood — themselves nailed to the two hickory trunks. During my childhood it had been level and fire engine bright.