Amy, in turn, pushed it off onto Tiffany, who was the youngest and had no concept of death. 'It's like sleeping,' we told her. 'Only you get a canopy bed.'
Poor Tiffany. She'd do just about anything in return for a little affection. All you had to do was call her Tiff and whatever you wanted was yours: her allowance money, her dinner, the contents of her Easter basket. Her eagerness to please was absolute and naked. When we asked her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was 'Where?'
We chose a quiet dip between two hills, a spot where drivers were almost required to skid out of control. She took her place, this six-year-old in a butter-colored coat, and we gathered on the curb to watch. The first car to happen by belonged to a neighbor, a fellow Yankee who had outfitted his tires with chains and stopped a few feet from our sister's body. 'Is that a person?' he asked.
'Well, sort of,' Lisa said. She explained that we'd been locked out of our house and though the man appeared to accept it as a reasonable explanation, I'm pretty sure it was him who told on us. Another car passed and then we saw our mother, this puffy figure awkwardly negotiating the crest of the hill. She did not own a pair of pants, and her legs were buried to the calves in snow. We wanted to send her home, to kick her out of nature just as she had kicked us out of the house, but it was hard to stay angry at someone that pitiful-looking.
'Are you wearing yourloafers?' Lisa asked, and in response our mother raised her bare foot. 'Iwas wearing loafers,' she said. 'I mean, really, it was there a second ago.'
This was how things went. One moment she was locking us out of our own house and the next we were rooting around in the snow, looking for her left shoe. 'Oh, forget about it,' she said. 'It'll turn up in a few days.' Gretchen fitted her cap over my mother's foot. Lisa secured it with her scarf, and surrounding her tightly on all sides, we made our way back home.
The Ship Shape
MY MOTHER AND I WERE at the dry cleaner's, standing behind a woman we had never seen. 'A nice-looking woman,' my mother would later say. 'Well put together. Classy.' The woman was dressed for the season in a light cotton shift patterned with oversize daisies. Her shoes matched the petals and her purse, which was black-and- yellow-striped, hung over her shoulder, buzzing the flowers like a lazy bumblebee. She handed in her claim check, accepted her garments, and then expressed gratitude for what she considered to be fast and efficient service. 'You know,' she said, 'people talk about Raleigh, but it isn't really true, is it?'
The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence. He wasn't the owner, just a helper who'd stepped in from the back, and it was clear he had no idea what she was saying.
'My sister and I are visiting from out of town,' the woman said, a little louder now, and again the man nodded. 'I'd love to stay awhile longer and explore, but my home — well,one of my homes — is on the garden tour, so I've got to get back to Williamsburg.'
I was eleven years old, yet still the statement seemed strange to me. If she'd hoped to impress the Korean, the woman had obviously wasted her breath, so who was this information for?
'My home — well,one of my homes': by the end of the day my mother and I had repeated this line no less than fifty times. The garden tour was unimportant, but the first part of her sentence brought us great pleasure. There was, as indicated by the dash, a pause between the wordshome andwell, a brief moment in which she'd decided,Oh, why not? The following word — one — had blown from her mouth as if propelled by a gentle breeze, and this was the difficult part. You had to get it just right, or else the sentence lost its power. Falling somewhere between a self-conscious laugh and a sigh of happy confusion, theone afforded her statement a double meaning. To her peers it meant 'Look at me, I catch myself coming and going!' and to the less fortunate it was a way of saying, 'Don't kid yourself, it's a lot of work having more than one house.'
The first dozen times we tried it, our voices sounded pinched and snobbish, but by midafternoon they had softened. We wanted what this woman had. Mocking her made it seem hopelessly unobtainable, and so we reverted to our natural selves.
'My home — well, one of my homes. .' My mother said it in a rush, as if she were under pressure to be more specific. It was the same way she said, 'My daughter — well, one of my daughters,' but a second home was more prestigious than a second daughter, and so it didn't really work. I went in the opposite direction, exaggerating the wordone in a way that was guaranteed to alienate my listener.
'Say it like that and people are going to be jealous,' my mother said.
'Well, isn't that what we want?'
'Sort of,' she said. 'But mainly we want them to be happy for us.'
'But why should you be happy for someone who has more than you do?'
'I guess it all depends on the person,' she said. 'Anyway, I suppose it doesn't matter. We'll get it right eventually. When the day arrives, I'm sure it'll just come to us.'
And so we waited.
At some point in the mid to late 1960s, North Carolina began referring to itself as 'Variety Vacationland.' The words were stamped onto license plates, and a series of television commercials reminded us that, unlike certain of our neighbors, we had both the beachand the mountains. There were those who bounced back and forth between one and the other, but most people tended to choose a landscape and stick to it. We ourselves were Beach People, Emerald Isle People, but that was mainly my mother's doing. I don't think our father would have cared whether he took a vacation or not. Being away from home left him anxious and crabby, but our mother loved the ocean. She couldn't swim, but enjoyed standing at the water's edge with a pole in her hand. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fishing, as she caught nothing and expressed neither hope nor disappointment in regard to her efforts. What she thought about while looking at the waves was a complete mystery, yet you could tell that these thoughts pleased her, and that she liked herself better while thinking them.
One year our father waited too late to make our reservations, and we were forced to take something on the sound. It wasn't a cottage but a run-down house, the sort of place where poor people lived. The yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence, and the air was thick with the flies and mosquitoes normally blown away by the ocean breezes. Midway through the vacation a hideous woolly caterpillar fell from a tree and bit my sister Amy on the cheek. Her face swelled and discolored, and within an hour, were it not for her arms and legs, it would have been difficult to recognize her as a human. My mother drove her to the hospital, and when they returned she employed my sister as Exhibit A, pointing as if this were not her daughter but some ugly stranger forced to share our quarters. 'Thisis what you get for waiting until the last minute,' she said to our father. 'No dunes, no waves, justthis.'
From that year on, our mother handled the reservations. We went to Emerald Isle for a week every September and were always oceanfront, a word that suggested a certain degree of entitlement. The oceanfront cottages were on stilts, which made them appear if not large, then at least imposing. Some were painted, some were sided 'Cape Cod style' with wooden shingles, and all of them had names, the cleverest being Loafer's Paradise. The owners had cut their sign in the shape of two moccasins resting side by side. The shoes were realistically painted and the letters were bloated and listless, loitering like drunks against the soft faux leather.
'Nowthat's a sign,' our father would say, and we would agree. There was The Skinny Dipper, Pelican's Perch, Lazy Daze, The Scotch Bonnet, Loony Dunes, the name of each house followed by the name and hometown of the owner. 'The Duncan Clan — Charlotte,' 'The Graftons — Rocky Mount,' 'Hal and Jean Starling of Pinehurst' — signs that essentially said, 'My home — well,one of my homes.'
While at the beach we sensed more than ever that our lives were governed by luck. When we had it — when it was sunny — my sisters and I felt as if we were somehow personally responsible. We were a fortunate family, and therefore everyone around us was allowed to swim and dig in the sand. When it rained, we were unlucky, and stayed indoors to search our souls. 'It'll clear after lunch,' our mother would say, and we would eat carefully, using the place mats that had brought us luck in the past. When that failed, we would move on to Plan B. 'Oh, Mother, you work too hard,' we'd say. 'Letus do the dishes. Letus sweep sand off the floor.' We spoke like
