Barefoot: A Novel

“I’ve been thinking about al those cigars I smoked,” she said. “One cigar a week for two years. You don’t think . . .”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

She was quiet. A white-haired man wearing madras Bermuda shorts strol ed by, walking a golden retriever. Vicki smiled at him.

“Beautiful family,” he said.

That was how they appeared to others, she knew. Blaine was asleep in the strol er, Porter was sucking on his pacifier. A man walking a dog on a mild summer afternoon would never know that Vicki was sick, and he would never know that Ted couldn’t handle it.

But here they were on Nantucket, walking along the bluff with Sankaty Head Lighthouse like a giant peppermint stick in front of them, its flashing beacon steady and predictable. Being here made Vicki feel better. Beautiful family, the man walking his dog said, and whereas he was wrong, he was also right. They would gril fish for dinner, boil early corn, walk to the market for ice cream cones. After the kids were asleep, Vicki and Ted would try again in bed.

No sooner had these thoughts soothed Vicki, no sooner was the man with the dog past them and out of earshot, than Ted cleared his throat in a way that made Vicki nervous.

“I want you to come home,” he said.

One of the things Vicki loved about her parents, Buzz and El en, was that they were stil married; they had been married for thirty-five years. Vicki appreciated this more than Brenda did because she herself was part of a marriage, she was tied to Ted Stowe in a thousand ways—the children, the house, the friends, the community, their church, the ten years of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, bil s paid, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, dinners out, movies, parties, plays, concerts, the countless conversations. It seemed when they were first together that their conversations had been about other things—worldly matters, politics, books, ideas—and now the conversations were only about themselves. Did that happen to every couple? These endless discussions of schedules and logistics, squash games and Junior League lunches, of Blaine’s fine-motor skil s, his bowel movements, the amount of TV he watched, of Porter sleeping or not sleeping, of should they have a third child, go for the girl, of Ted’s career, of their investments, their taxes, the warranty on the Yukon, of Vicki’s involvement with the neighborhood association, of which day for what kind of recycling. Was everyone so inward-looking? Or was it just their family, the Stowes, and especial y now, with Vicki’s cancer?

A few years earlier, El en Lyndon had said something curious to Vicki. Your father and I have been having the same argument for fourteen years, she said. Different manifestations, but the same argument.

Vicki was both grateful and disturbed to discover that she didn’t know what this argument between her parents might be about. She hadn’t lived at home since the summer after her sophomore year in col ege, true, but it unsettled her to think that she didn’t know her parents wel enough to be privy to the subject of their one and only argument. And yet she understood, because she was married, that her parents’ marriage was its own thing, an entity separate even from the children it produced; it was mysterious, sacred, unknowable.

Vicki’s marriage to Ted had its own nooks and crannies, false starts and dead ends, with its own arguments, repeated and repeated again. I want you to come home. Ted didn’t have to say another word—Vicki had the rest of his speech memorized. I love you, I miss you, I miss the kids, I hate coming home to an empty house, I’m sick of Chinese takeout and frozen waffles. The house is too quiet. Porter’s just a baby; he’ll forget who I am—he already cries when he sees me. I want you to come home so you can have chemo in the city, let’s not mess around, let’s get serious, let’s kill these cells, smug fuckers, get the best doctors, so what if the drugs are exactly the same, administered the same way? I want you at Sloan-Kettering so I can sleep at night, knowing you have the best money can buy, no second-guessing.

But what Ted was also saying was, I want you to come home because I’m afraid I’m going to lose you. Afraid like a little kid, Vick. Scared shitless. I’m going to lose you in September on the operating table, or at some point after that if the surgery doesn’t work, if the tumors aren’t resectable, if the cancer metastasizes to your brain or your liver, if they can’t get it all out.

I want you to come home, Ted said, because he had no faith. And that was what real y stood between husband and wife, that was what had turned him into milquetoast, that was what caused Vicki’s anger and Ted’s impotence: He thought she was going to die. And, too, he didn’t understand Nantucket the way Vicki did, he hadn’t grown up in the house on Shel Street, he didn’t feel the same way about the ocean, the sand, the reliable beacon of Sankaty Head Lighthouse. There were so many things that no longer mattered, but these things—this ocean, this air, this ground under her feet—did matter.

“I am home,” Vicki said.

Vicki made it crystal clear: The most important thing when caring for children was to establish a routine. Especial y when those children’s mother was sick. “The kids sense a change,” Vicki said. “They sense uncertainty, they know something is wrong. Your job is to keep them calm and secure.

Be consistent. Promote sameness.”

“No problem,” Josh said. “I’m al over it.” He nearly went on to describe life with his father: dinner at eight- thirty, the beer, the iceberg salad. Josh knew al about routine, he knew al about sameness.

And so, the summer started: Monday through Friday, Josh’s alarm went off at seven-thirty. It took him thirteen minutes to brush his teeth, shave, comb his hair, apply sunscreen, get dressed, and towel the dew off the seats of his Jeep—and anywhere from eleven to fourteen minutes to get from his house in Miacomet out to ’Sconset, depending on traffic by the high school. He pul ed up to the cottage on Shel Street right before eight and invariably found Brenda and Blaine on the front step throwing pebbles into a paper cup. Brenda was always in a short nightgown—she had two, he’d learned, one pink and a white one with flowers. Josh was convinced she stayed in her nightgown to torment him. When Josh arrived, she stood up and said, My work here is done, and disappeared into the house, into her room, where she changed into a bikini. Josh was on board with establishing a routine, but he couldn’t help appreciating variation—such as which nightgown Brenda was wearing, which bikini Brenda chose to put on, and the substance and duration of their conversations about her work. Because what Josh had learned early on, the first or second day on the job, was that Brenda was writing a screenplay. There had been one kid in Chas Gorda’s writing workshop who aspired to write a screenplay, a sophomore named Drake Edgar. Drake Edgar had the distinction of being the most earnest student in the class; he handed in scene after dreadful scene and wrote down everyone’s criticism, verbatim. Chas Gorda himself—though his first and best-known novel had been made into a film which could now most generously be described as “cult”—suggested early on to Drake Edgar that the writing workshop was a place for pursuing serious fiction rather than scripts for horror films or thril ers. The other students, including Josh, dismissed Drake Edgar,