Tell your mother.
Ask your father.
“I’m not your secretary,” I told my father one time. Not that this had any effect.
My parents and I had been sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment, finishing dinner—television on, no conversation, picking at a reheated casserole that wasn’t any good back on Day One—when the call came, with Forrest’s job offer. The au pair they’d hired had just canceled on them. Did I want to join his family at Wonderland as their mother’s helper?
Was the sky gray? (In Hubbard, the answer was always yes.)
“Can you imagine?” my mother said—a rare moment in which she seemed actually to address my father. “With Regina in the shapeshe’s in? Some spoiled French girl decides she has better things to do and leaves the family without a babysitter the week before the children’s school gets out?”
The shape Regina was in.
Regina was Forrest’s wife, of course. It was never clear what her problem was, only that she had one. I used to think she was just drunk a lot—a condition I knew well—from the slurring of her speech as the day went on, but though she definitely took prescription drugs, Regina never touched alcohol.
She was very skinny. And she was always knitting something. She explained it to my mother one time. “If you’re holding knitting needles, you’re not so likely to reach for a snack.” She held those knitting needles a lot. If she did eat, it was probably celery.
“The thing about dealing with Regina is recognizing she’s just not a normal person,” my father said. He was the one who held out a little sympathy for her. My mother? None.
How Forrest put up with her was a mystery. There was her money, of course—the brownstone in Back Bay, Boston, where they lived the rest of the year, their Florida vacation home, right on the ocean. (We’d never visited there, but every Christmas we got a card with the four of them—Forrest, Regina, Hayward, and Jilly—pictured in front of a giant white tree with matching ornaments. Blue one year, purple the next.)
But the place that occupied my imagination was their lake house, Wonderland. If you asked me to dream up what heaven might look like, that would be it.
“I’d probably marry a psycho too,” my mother said, “if they came with a maid and a cook and a handyman to take care of everything.”
According to my father, none of that mattered much to Forrest.
“The guy loves his wife,” he said. “They’ve got this thing going on between them. It must make him feel good, taking care of her.”
That summer I thought he’d take care of me too.
Now the two of us leaned against the side of the convertible. Forrest stood there taking it all in: The street where he grew up, with its boarded-up storefronts and graffiti, stray dogs and winos, the smell of rotting trash. The windows of my family’s shabby apartment two floors up.
“I’ll just run up and say hello to your old man,” Forrest said.
A look passed between us. As early in the day as it was, my father would have started in on the vodka. One look at my face and Forrest put away the idea of a visit.
Then I was buckling into my seat beside him, and we were heading toward the highway—the wind in my hair, like an actress in a commercial.
“You want the top up?” he asked me. I shook my head. Everything was perfect. It wouldn’t matter if I never laid eyes on Hubbard, New Jersey, again. Forrest Emerson was delivering me to my future. I might have thought—though I wouldn’t have said this part out loud—that Forrest Emersonwasmy future.
“What do you say we hit a casino in Hartford on our way north?” he asked me. Before I had time to respond, he slapped his thigh. “Damn. I keep forgetting you’re just fourteen years old. I was all set to teach you how to play blackjack. Give you a hundred dollars and see how far you get with it.”
“I’ll be fifteen in September,” I reminded him.
“Oh, well then. That makes all the difference,” he said.
2
Against the Wind
Of the many things I loved about Forrest—how much fun he was and that he always had great ideas for things to do and the energy to do them—this was the best: He paid attention to me. He may have been the first person in my life—the only one, my parents included—about whom I could have said this.
Up until now I’d only gotten to see him once a year—but that had been enough to secure his position as my favorite person. For as long as I’d known him, which was all my life, Forrest had wanted to know what I was up to, who my friends were, what I cared about. Where some adults would ask you,How’s school?and never bother to wait for the answer, Forrest always listened. The questions he asked were never the obvious ones. He wanted to know: Did I ever skip school? And if I were to do that, how would I spend the day? He asked me what music I listened to and if I had an interest in skateboarding, or if I ever thought about getting a tattoo. Would I walk naked for two blocks down the main street of my town if I got paid a million dollars to do it? Would I do it for a thousand? Where was the cutoff?
He might also inquire about my favorite flavor of ice cream, then pull over at the next exit to buy a pint of it.
The last time I’d seen Forrest—Labor Day, the summer before—he asked me if I believed in God. Then again, he wanted to know if I ever shoplifted.
