Читать книгу Temperance Creek - Pamela Royes - Страница 17

Christmas 1975

“I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling Looking for something, what can it be?”

—JONI MITCHELL

In second gear I drove slowly by my parents’ new home, the neighborhood still under construction. A trim yellow ranch-style with brick detailing, it sat below the road and was built partially into a hillside. A single strand of multicolored lights hung along the eaves.

I parked on the hill, killed the engine, pulled up the emergency brake, and finished my smoke. All the family heirlooms were inside, but I wasn’t sure what to call home anymore. My heart was bouncing around the inside of my chest like a rubber ball trapped in a clothes dryer. We hadn’t shared a Christmas holiday for years. I got out, stubbed my cigarette on the pavement, located the Big Dipper, and grabbed my bag.

Then I opened the front door. “Hey, anybody here?”

Dad, silver-haired and festive in a red cashmere sweater, stepped into the entryway, arms open. “Sweetie, good to see you.”

“Hey, Pops,” I said, smiling as we hugged. “Merry Christmas.” He smelled of toothpaste and shaving cream, and there was a hint of Old Spice, but it wasn’t overpowering. His shave was so close I reached up and affectionately patted his cheeks with my palms.

“I didn’t hear you pull in,” he said, stepping back to peer through the door glass toward the street. “Still driving that Volkswagen?” he asked, shaking his head. “How’s it running? How’s school?”

“Fine. Great.”

“Need help packing anything in?”

“Let’s do it later. I want to see everyone first. Is Mark here?”

As I kicked off my boots, Mom appeared in the hallway, wiping her hands on a tea towel. Her face was flushed. “Here you are, I was beginning to worry.” She let me hug her, but for no more than a couple seconds before she backed away, still smiling.

“Are we having company tonight?” I asked, glancing down at my flannel shirt and bell-bottomed jeans.

“Just us.”

Though it was just us, Mom was wearing the silver jewelry of every Christmas—a large pendant of Celtic design on a chain and silver bracelets that jangled and chimed.

Randy took the stairs two at a time, and we hugged, patting one another’s backs. “My brother,” I said. “My sister,” he said. Lanky, bespectacled, and curly-haired, Randy floated along like a tall red bobber on the end of a pole, indifferent to the tensions that arose when we were all home.

“How’s it going so far?” I mumbled under my breath.

“So far, so good.”

The table was set. Upon a red tablecloth, the family porcelain shone, flanked by silverware engraved with the letter S, for Severson. Overhead, the chandelier prisms sparkled, and in the living room I could see the tree, boughs tinseled, adorned with ornaments and spread over a mound of gifts.

Despite our differences, I loved being home for Christmas. Especially now that I’d stopped (well, nearly) agonizing over the contents of the presents under the tree and could focus on the pleasures of sleeping in. Letting someone cook, answer the phone, fill up my tank with gas, and take me out for lunch.

Turning, I saw my brother Mark coming up the stairs. He was thin. Very thin. And he was using a cane. “Pammy,” he said.

“Wow,” I said. “What’s happened to you?”

He was vague. Said something about an infection, that it was nothing time wouldn’t heal, but when he crossed the floor to hug me, I noticed how he leaned on it. He’s always been thin, I thought, and I glanced questioningly at Mom. But she shook her head, and I postponed my questions.

We mixed drinks, gathered in the kitchen, and eventually took our places at the table, all of us talking at once. “A toast! A toast!” I cried, hitting the edge of my whiskey tumbler with the back of my spoon. “To Mom! And to all you fair people, and” (a little drunkenly) “the ham!”

“To Mom and the ham!”

Since my parents’ astonishing move from North Dakota to Oregon three years before, there were empty seats, missing faces. No extended family, no long-standing friends dropping by unannounced to clink cocktail glasses of good cheer. Though Mom never expressed any longing for the life they left behind, I noticed she’d put on weight, her black blouse pulling a little at the buttons and the long brocade skirt in rich hues of red and orange taut at the waistline. We passed steaming bowls of traditional fare. Ham, rolls, scalloped potatoes, three-bean salad, green salad, deviled eggs, and asparagus. Mom winked at me and whispered, “Rum cake for dessert.”

“Mom,” I groaned, patting my stomach.

Watching Mark, animated and relaxed, converse with my Mother, it was almost possible to forget the change in his appearance. Randy and I shared in but somehow remained outside of their clever banter, their laughter, though I never felt jealous, like I think maybe Dad did, because I loved to see her happy. Soon, Mark would return to Europe and take with him whatever it was that made her sparkle. He couldn’t please Dad, but Mom overlooked his drinking, his chain-smoking, his ineffable otherness. She adored Mark’s wit and intelligence, his noble profile and slender, expressive hands.

Randy asked Mark, “What’s it like to wake up in Paris?”

“Oh, it’s noisy, crowded. I don’t really get up that early, as you well know.” He smiled and gave a self-deprecating kind of laugh.

Dad attempted to direct the conversation to the subject of Mark’s work, which had something to do with theater and wasn’t what he considered, after eight years of college, a financially mature way to make a living (substantiated by the frequency with which Mark hit my parents up for loans), but Randy diverted that line of questioning by asking Dad about his work and the rising cost of real estate. I took a deep breath, rolled my eyes at Randy across the table, and wondered what the odds were we’d get through the main course, all of us intact and seated.

“It’s slow, but it’s starting to pick up.” Although Dad had opened a real estate office in town and was giving it a go, it wasn’t the same. No Francis Kanowski, trusted friend and devoted secretary, who worked first for my grandpa and then for my dad, keeping their office affairs running smoothly for nearly fifty years. It must be hard, I thought, really looking at him. He was sixty-three, trying to build a reputation in a new place, without contacts or connections. And then Dad, his jaw tightening, interrupted Randy to ask Mark how his car was running.

“I don’t have a car. Nobody in Paris drives. Parking in Paris is inconceivable.” He lounged against the back of the chair, indolent under Dad’s scrutiny. “I walk,” he said, “or take the metro.”

“But I thought your mother and I loaned you money for a car? What did that check go toward?”

“Bruce,” Mom said, “let’s not get into that now.” She got up and packed a few dishes into the kitchen, hoping to deflect the tension. Here we go, I thought, torn between retreating to my bedroom or shouting out loud, Here’s an idea, how about we just get along!

I was relieved when Dad retired to the den to watch the news, or the parade, or whatever it was that people watched on Christmas Eve when they were trying to avoid one another. Randy jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen, and we gathered dishes and began filling the dishwasher.

With Mark home, Randy told me he’d gotten off easy this Christmas. “Dad’s actually supportive of me working in the county assessor’s office. Hasn’t mentioned taking the Realtor’s exam once.”

“Surreal,” I said, handing him a plate to stack. He raised his eyebrows and peered meaningfully at me over the top of his glasses.

“I have a job with benefits,” Randy said. “Stability.”

“Stability,” I echo, singing the word to the tune of “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof. Randy grinned and pointed to a glass, and I handed it to him. “How does it feel to be the only one toeing the line?”

“I’m not sure whether to feel relief or concern,” Randy said. “I mean, what have I let go of in return for his approval?” I knew he was talking about his art degree. “It’s odd, sharing this sense of camaraderie with him.”

“But you were never in trouble. You’ve always been the perfect child,” I retorted, wondering if I should confide in him, tell him I want to quit school and travel. We sparred around, giving each other little wet-handed slaps, and went back to the dining room where Mark and Mom were deep in conversation. Randy sat down, but I stood, undecided.

“I’m going to my bedroom, do a little reading,” I said, walking around the table to give them hugs, Mark smelling of unfiltered French nicotine, of subways and dark cafés. “Thanks, Mom, outstanding dinner, as usual. Merry Christmas.”

“No rum cake?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows.

“Not tonight, too full.”

Dad was in the den sitting in his straight-backed chair with his socks off. I wanted to tell him how I felt about school, but I didn’t know how. I stood beside him, neither of us speaking. Then I said, “What you watching?”

“Movie. Say, we haven’t talked about your grades. Your mother and I are concerned about you moving out to that farm. You did say farm? With those . . . people.”

“School’s good. I’m feeling really good about everything.”

He looked up at me.

“Well, a wonderful Christmas Eve. I’m going to bed now so I can get up before Santa.” I bent over and hugged him. “I love you Dad, g’night.”

“Night, Pammy. Good to have you home.”

“Dad, maybe we could take a drive tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

In my room I rummaged through my suitcase, found my book, and flopped on the bed.

Compared to my gap year after high school graduation, my junior year of college was tasting bland as canned bamboo. At age eighteen, fresh from the constraints of parental supervision, I’d bought a ticket on a ferry to Anchorage, Alaska, and spent the next six months hiking glaciers, eating crab, and watching moose glide through Sitka spruce woods on telescoping legs outside my single-wide trailer. I’d thrown back two shots of Wild Turkey before beginning my nightly shift at Chilicoot Charlie’s, where I’d deflected the advances of union pipeline employees who laid down fifty-dollar tips and kept their hands to themselves until the power went out and serving drinks turned into a game of catch and release. In January, sun-starved and almost at a loss as to how to keep my VW running in subzero temperatures, I traversed the frozen ALCAN Highway with a companion in a loaf-shaped bread truck (my bug towed behind) and spent four months working for an Arabian horse trainer in the Arizona desert, hanging out with a group of college baseball players, the pitcher a good friend from high school. The year had ended with a three-week train tour of Europe with my fifty-one-year-old mother. In Paris, we were joined by my brother Mark and his redheaded friend Yves, only too happy to act as guide. Yves and I rode the subways, French-kissed in cinemas with English subtitles, and sipped Drambuie in dark underground cafés while my brother chaperoned my mother through vaulted museums of priceless art.

Now, listening to the night noises in my parents’ house, I couldn’t put my finger on what had gone wrong. After a year’s stint at a community college, I’d moved to Eugene and enrolled in the University of Oregon’s animal science program, but now after two and a half years even the prerequisites were killing me and I was beginning to question whether a career as a veterinarian was merely a childhood fantasy. I hadn’t gotten close to anything four-legged and still breathing, and I loathed the Willamette Valley rain and the repetitive conventionality of my current course, the inevitable Birkenstocks, soybeans, and granola liberalism of campus life.

I’d made friends in the art department and was seeing a med student named David. But the old farm I was living in outside of town, and my roommates there, were the reasons I was still in Eugene, still in school. That, and not wanting to disappoint my parents.

I opened my book to the bookmark, and a napkin with a map drawn on it fell out. I picked it up and remembered meeting with Chuck last week for a beer. He’d asked me how school was going.

“Every chance, I’m gone,” I’d said. “To the coast, to the mountains. I’ve gotten to where I drive home some weekends to be with my parents. How weird is that?”

“Why don’t you come out to northeastern Oregon? Annie and I are renovating the old schoolhouse in Minam. There’s this whole group of people living in the hills. Like us. It’s nuts. During your break, drive out, spend a few days. Look, I’ll draw you a map.”

I tucked the napkin in the back of the book. From the other room, I heard raised voices.

Mark: “I’m going out.”

Dad: “What would you find open on Christmas Eve?”

Mark: “A bar.”

Dad: “You must know your mother and I are concerned about your drinking. Where is the money going that we send you? Why with all your education can’t you find a decent job?”

Mark: “There’s no talking to you.”

The door shut. The room went silent. I heard the sound of a car engine catching and the garage door opening. I got up and watched his headlights make the corner at the intersection and disappear down the hill, knowing he’d spend the rest of the evening in the pub and not come back until we were all in bed. I doubted Dad slept when he was here. I didn’t think Dad had ever tried to understand why he and Mark didn’t get along, just accepted their relationship as difficult. One that required a lot of space. Like the distance between here and Antarctica, or Pluto. Miles of space. I don’t think he knew Mark was gay. But he knew something was different.

After Mark left, I remembered my gifts for the family, still in the car. And that cake. The television was blaring, and when I peeked into the living room, I could see Mom’s empty Seagram’s glass and her, asleep in the chair. As I sliced the cake, I watched Dad touch her shoulder and then give it a gentle shake, saying, “Lois.” He held her arm while she rose, and I watched her stagger down the hall to the bedroom. Her arms outstretched. Trying to feel her way.