Forrest would promise a waterskiing lesson. Had done so a number of times, in fact. And no doubt he meant to make good on his promise. He just wasn’t all that reliable.
Cool and detached as she invariably seemed, Regina was the one who made sure I put on sunscreen. It was Regina who asked me—in one of her notes—whether I’d had a tetanus shot and made an appointment for me to get one.Last summer I found a nail sticking out at the dock,she had typed, on one of her notes, early on.We don’t want you ending up with lockjaw.
It was Regina, not Forrest, who had remembered my birthday every September for as long as I could remember—even the year my ownparents forgot. Though the date fell just after Labor Day—the week following my family’s annual visit to Maine and her own children’s return to school in Boston—Regina never failed to put a package in the mail for me.
She sent the strangest, most random-seeming gifts, but they had a certain unexpected magic to them. One year my present was a hand-carved owl and a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. She sent an amaryllis bulb, a book about dolphins, a pair of fishnet stockings. I was ten years old, and my mother called the gift ridiculous and inappropriate, but I loved them. One time—I doubt I was older than six—an extremely heavy box arrived at our apartment, containing a block of clay and a card with just two words:Make something.
Last year, she’d sent a vinyl recording of a singer I’d never heard of, named Maria Callas. This, at an age when I and every girl I knew was listening to Madonna.
You seem like someone who would understand what makes Maria Callas so different from everyone else,Regina had written in the note that accompanied the record. I had no idea how she came to this conclusion. Those times we visited, Regina and I barely spoke.
And if you don’t understand yet, you will,she’d written.Once you get a little more life under your belt.
It was Regina who, on one of my family’s visits a few summers earlier, had rented a VCR tape of a French movie about a young boy growing up in Paris, who was misunderstood by his parents and then his teachers, accused of crimes he did not commit, and sent to juvenile detention. What other adult would showThe 400 Blowsto a nine-year-old, just barely old enough to read the subtitles?
“Frances will like this one,” she’d said to the others, who decided they’d rather sit outside on the patio with their gin and tonics than watch with the two of us.
She was right, of course. I knew what it was like to be that boy in the movie.
Here was an odd thing about Regina and her gifts to me. As much time and thought as she appeared to give to considering what I might like and what it was I might want or need that I didn’t have, she never seemed that interested in her own children.
One night when I was in the living room, reading my Stephen King book—Regina on the opposite couch with her knitting—Jilly came bouncing into the room with a medal around her neck. She’d won a prize at sailing camp that day. She wanted to show it to her mother.
The way Regina looked at her, it was almost as if she were watching through one-way glass. She took in the sight of her daughter, twirling her plastic medal, but said nothing. When Jilly landed in her lap, I saw her wince.
A person might have thought that Forrest would have appeared irritated or resentful, witnessing his wife’s strange, distant, and downright cold behavior toward just about everyone around her. It wouldn’t have seemed surprising if he’d grown distant himself. What amazed me, as a person accustomed to seeing married people exchanging hostile remarks, if they even spoke to each other, was how amiably he accepted everything Regina did, and more so, everything she didn’t do—the hours she spent on the chaise lounge, the way she brushed their children aside, not to mention him, when he’d lean in to stroke her hair, as he did now. But Forrest held steady. He never seemed hurt by the bored look in Regina’s eyes.
Jilly did. Jilly worshipped her father, of course. On this particular occasion, she deposited herself firmly in Forrest’s lap, confident of the affection and enthusiasm she’d find there. He picked her up and spun her around, pulled up her Care Bears T-shirt, and pressed his mouth against her stomach, making fart sounds and tickling her.
“Da-ddy!” She always pretended she was annoyed, but I knew she loved it.
“Your daughter just had a root beer float,” Regina said, sounding wearier than ever. “If you aren’t careful, you’ll make her throw up.”
But Jilly was already asking him to do it again. “I’m worn out,” Forrest said, feigning the kind of exhaustion Regina conveyed twenty-four seven. “Can’t you see I’m an old man?”
Not even close.
I sat there watching as if this were a movie. Only I got to be in it, as an extra, anyway. Unlike Jilly, I kept my adoration for Forrest hidden. It was a secret little flame burning hot in my heart.
Then what do you know, he turned to me.
“Our Frances,” he said, reaching my spot on the couch and shaking his head with a look of wonderment, as if he could hardly believe it that I was actually there. I felt the same thing, but more so. How was it possible that this god of a man shared my opinion?
“Our Frances!” he said again. “I don’t know how we ever got along without you,” he said. “You know you’re part of the family now.”
I tried not to show how thrilled I was, hearing the words. I looked down at my lap.
My cheeks burned. In that place I could not name, the one I’d begun touching in my bed at night, a warm feeling coursed through me.
I looked over at Regina then. Her face didn’t look mad or jealous in the way girls’ faces got when somebody got asked to the dance by a boy they hoped might ask them instead. The look on her face was just sad, that was all. The saddest look I’d ever seen on her maybe—like she was a dead person, back on earth just long enough to pay a quick visit to the living before heading back to wherever it was dead people went once their hearts stopped beating.
In my journal that night, I didn’t write about Regina’s coldness to Jilly, or Jilly’s disappointment. I wrote down Forrest’s words to me:Part of the family.
15
Picking Up After People
Forrest and I were down at the water, gathering up empty bottles of bubble solution and popped water balloons left by Jilly and her friends. I’d learned by now that children at Lake Catherine—not just Hayward and Jilly but their friends too—left a wake of candy wrappers and pop bottles and abandoned toys behind them when they got bored with playing. It never seemed to occur to them that there wouldn’t be someone to pick up after them, and they were right.
