finger into the crystal bowl beside the wine bottles. Miss Ruby exhaled through her nostrils. “You can’t use a knife like a civilized person?”
“It tastes better like this.” Charlie licked his finger. “Alice, want a drink?”
I held up my wine.
“Excellent,” he said. “And you look ravishing, of course.” He leaned in to kiss my lips; clearly, he was in a performative mode. I had seen this a few times in Madison when we were in groups. Sometimes he was charmingly silly but still capable of listening to what you said, and sometimes, particularly when he’d been drinking for several hours, he was wound up into a frenzy of goofiness, deaf to the remarks of anyone who wasn’t similarly drunk and wound up. I’d simply ridden out these episodes, waiting until we could go home for the night, sometimes exchanging sympathetic looks with the wives or girlfriends of other men. I didn’t want to encourage Charlie, but I also had no desire to tell him how to behave.
“Miss Ruby can verify that this is the only time in family history I’ve been the first one here,” Charlie said. “I didn’t want you to think you were in the wrong place, Lindy. Blackwell Standard Time is—What would you say, Miss Ruby, about forty-five minutes behind?”
“Don’t be fresh,” she said.
Charlie gestured toward her. “This woman took care of me from the day I came home from the hospital, and honest to God, I’d lay down my life for her.”
“I’ll bet you would,” Miss Ruby said as she walked back into the house.
“She’s hilarious, right?” Charlie said. “The genuine article.” I was not sure I agreed, but immediately, with Miss Ruby having stepped away and an audience of only me, he settled down a little. Still, I could tell that he was geared up for the night ahead. And I couldn’t blame him—it was obvious that for the Blackwells, family reunions not only involved competitive sports but were a kind of competitive sport in themselves. Being around the Blackwells (these impressions returned again and again in the years to come) filled me with a jealous wonder at their clannish energy, their confidence, their sheer numbers, and also with a gratitude that I had grown up in a calm and quiet family. So many inside jokes for the Blackwells to keep track of, so many nicknames and references to long-ago incidents, so much one-upmanship: Surely I was not the only one who found it tiring.
Within the next half hour, they all appeared, either from inside the Alamo or traipsing over from the other cottages, many of them wet-haired, the men in seersucker suits or khaki pants and navy blazers, the women in sundresses, holding the hands of children—little girls in green or pink dresses with smocking across the chest, or hand-stitched balloons or apples, wearing Mary Janes on their feet; little boys in shortalls and white socks that folded down and white saddle shoes.
Drinks were distributed—most of the adults had old-fashioneds, while the children had Shirley Temples or Roy Rogers—and Miss Ruby carried around the crab dip and I met the family members I hadn’t met before. It quickly became clear that there was no conversation in which I was required to do much more than nod and laugh. “We’re all
I subsequently found myself in a conversation with Uncle Trip, also loquacious, who explained that he divided his time—for reasons of business or pleasure, I could not discern—among Milwaukee, Key West, and Toronto. This seemed to me at the time to be the oddest triangle imaginable, but really, for the Blackwells’ friends, it proved not to be particularly unusual at all. Milwaukee and Sun Valley, Milwaukee and the Adirondacks, Minneapolis and Cheyenne and Phoenix, Chicago and San Francisco. They sold textiles, or mined ore, or owned a gallery in Santa Fe, or they were consultants—this was before consulting was as common as it is today—or they had just taken a cruise around the Gulf of Alaska, and it had, they reported, been marvelous.
As for the employ of Charlie’s brothers, Ed, the oldest, was the congressman; Charlie’s second oldest brother, John, was CEO of Blackwell Meats (on the dock that afternoon, Charlie had introduced John as “the sausage king’s sausage king”); and Arthur, who was two years older than Charlie, worked for the family company as a lawyer. None of their wives held jobs.
The porch was crowded, and I was discussing Wisconsin’s public school superintendent with John, which is to say that John was talking about the time Superintendent Ruka, whom he called Herb, had birdied a long par 4 at the Maronee Country Club, when Liza and Margaret, John’s two daughters, scampered between us and disappeared again into the thicket of adult bodies. The younger one, Margaret, returned and tapped my forearm. She was looking up at me with an expression of nervousness, excitement, and secrecy that made me almost certain she had been dispatched by her older sister. “Are you Uncle Chas’s girlfriend?”
“Margaret, what do we say when we interrupt a conversation?” John chided.
“Excuse me,” Margaret said. “Excuse me, but are you Uncle Chas’s girlfriend?”
“I am,” I said.
“Do you wear perfume?”
I laughed. “Sometimes.”
“Do you know how to do cat’s cradle?”
“I do,” I said. “Do
“It’s Liza’s string, but she said if you play, I can, too.”
I looked at John. “I believe I’ve been summoned.” John smiled as if embarrassed (I can’t imagine he really was, but all the Blackwells understood how endearing a bit of self-deprecation can be—and the more privileged the source, of course, the more endearing the self-deprecation). “You certainly don’t have to,” he said, then, to Margaret, “What do you say to Miss Lindgren?”
“Thank you, Miss Lindgren,” Margaret said as she took my hand and guided me out the screen door and onto the porch steps, where Liza awaited us. A few feet away, their boy cousins were dueling with skinny sticks.
