Peter was planning to have Frank be the next big star on Animal Planet. After taking a few minutes of footage, Peter left him outside his pen to go scout a different location. Tortoises are faster than you think, especially when you are not looking, and by the time Peter came back, Frank was nowhere to be found. I went ballistic.
“How could you lose Frank?” I yelled.
“He can’t have gotten far,” Peter weakly replied.
I pushed past him and out to the garage, where I grabbed a small chainsaw. I went to the area where Peter was now yelling Frank’s name, as though a tortoise knows to come when called, and began mowing down bushes. I had no intention of stopping until either all eighteen acres were barren or we found Frank. You have to understand how attached I am to this tortoise. He is not one of those stinky water turtles that do nothing but generate lengthy discussions about whose turn it is to clean the algae-infested aquarium. Frank is a valued member of this family. We have had him for many years and watched him grow. He has height notches on the wall, like the other kids. This pet has a real personality, and he recognizes people. He greets me every morning in the kitchen, and he spends his afternoons next to me while I sew or write, soaking up the sunshine flooding in from the windows. A tortoise as perfect as Frank only comes around once in life, and the thought of losing him made me apoplectic.
After several hours of what can only be described as intense pruning, I gave up. Despondent, I went back into the house to have a cup of coffee and mourn my loss. I blamed Peter entirely; this was going to cost him our marriage—and he would have to take custody of the children. As I sat there fuming, Frank ambled out from behind one of Peter’s oversize man speakers in the kitchen.
“Frank, you’re here!” I was truly thrilled to see him. It seems that, like me, Frank is not a real outdoorsman. He’s a city tortoise at heart, and had made his way back into the house.
“Hey, Chainsaw Charlie, you should have seen the look on your face.” Peter laughed. “I’ve never seen you that concerned about any of the children.”
“That’s because Frank’s never invited another tortoise up here without asking me first.”
IT IS GREAT HAVING THE COUNTRY HOUSE TO GET AWAY TO ON weekends, but I wouldn’t want to live there full-time. For one thing, there are no sidewalks, so my heels sink into the mud, which pretty much relegates me to the indoors with the tortoises and scared city children. For another, my connection to civilization—satellite TV—is tenuous. A couple of clouds and I am on my own. But mostly, I don’t fit in with the locals. This is truly the land of antiquing and Birkenstocking, two activities not on my to-do list. There are plenty of New Yorkers who likewise make the trek to the Berkshires every weekend and infuse cash into the local economy, but we are generally regarded with disdain by the sandalistas, and I’m pretty sure we’re subject to a separate price list for local services. It’s a pity, this animosity, as there is quite a collection of interesting characters in the country, and I wouldn’t mind getting to know them. For the most part, though, they prefer Peter; his eccentricity mysteriously makes them read him as one of them rather than one of us. Because of this, Peter learns things about the country that I will never find out firsthand.
Did you know that you need a permit to drive around with a dead body in your car? Or that it takes 120 pounds of dry ice to keep an unembalmed body from decomposing? Peter does. He was invited over when our neighbor Christopher performed a do-it-yourself funeral for his mother. After displaying the body in her bedroom on a bed of dry ice for several days, he drove her to the crematorium in the back of a borrowed station wagon. When his ninety-six-year-old father, Bill, died—Bill had played basketball with my kids right up until the end—Christopher took an even more active role: he helped with the actual cremation. I have heard of growing your own vegetables and even slaughtering your own Sunday roast, but cremating your own father? That’s a bit too homegrown for me. Can you imagine sitting around a neighbor’s house enjoying a cup of coffee and some conversation with a dead man packed in dry ice awaiting the pyre on the dining room table?
Apparently, Peter can. He may not have performed a DIY funeral on either of his parents, but he has come close.
Peter’s mother, Peggy, loved her cat Heloise, or at least loved to make a fuss about her. (Apparently there was once an Abelard, but that was well before my time.) All day long, Peggy would scream from her bed: “Shut the door! The cat will get out!” or “Where’s the cat? Have you let the cat escape?” She routinely whipped her homecare nurses into a panic. Keeping track of Heloise seemed to be her way of staying connected to the world as she was dying of cancer.
Peggy left Heloise to my daughter, Cleo. By that time, Heloise must have been quite old, but she was so petite and spry that we always thought of her as a kitten. We were all surprised when she began to slow down and eventually died.
Channeling the care Christopher gave his parents, Peter pulled out all the stops for the burial of Heloise. As her body lay covered, rotting in the grass, with an occasional dousing of bleach to ward off the maggots, Peter spent two days crafting her a slight mahogany coffin with meticulous dovetail joints and fancy brass hardware. When it was finally stained and polished to perfection, and Heloise was safely screwed inside, the funeral began. It was fit for a Kennedy. The children walked her coffin to our pet cemetery on a wagon covered with an American flag. There was a BB-gun salute—not twenty-one-gun, but at least twelve-gun—as her remains were lowered into the ground. When the soil was filled in, a lion statue was placed as a headstone. As I watched Peter’s face, it occurred to me that taking such care to bury his mother’s cat was actually his way of letting go of his mother.
I MAKE FUN OF DAIRY AIR AND PRETEND TO BE ON THE LOOKOUT for a better piece of property, but the truth is, this scruffy place works perfectly for our family. We sit on some of the most beautiful landscape in the Northeast, and Peter would have me living in a tent as long as the view was good. There is a mix of woods and fields and a lovely pond that freezes over in the winter, hard enough for us to convince ourselves it is safe for ice skating. Any other time of year, the pond reflects the colors of the spectacular sunsets that melt into the Taconic Mountains. In the fall, the country is downright Rockwellesque, with the color of the changing leaves displayed in about a thousand different hues. The place looks especially picturesque in the winter, when a pristine blanket of snow turns the crap on the lawn into a wonderland of sculpture and our leaky heating produces a perfect row of icicles along the eaves. We could never leave, anyway, with Heloise planted firmly in the pet cemetery. So here I stay, and perhaps one day I will uncover for myself all the hidden potential.
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
I MUST HAVE BEEN JACK THE RIPPER, OR PERHAPS Lucrezia Borgia, in a previous life, since in this one I have been sentenced to life in a two-bedroom apartment with six males. Cleo escaped early on in search of female companion-ship—her choice of an all-girl boarding school not in the least accidental. Devoid of her feminine charms, my close quarters are populated with a gender I am incapable of understanding. I wouldn’t describe myself as a girly-girl, but I do enjoy all the accoutrements that come with being me: the jewelry, the makeup, and of course the shoes. If I lived in a house full of five little girls I would be in heaven. I would sew little matching dresses for all of us and our dolls, purchase exquisite tiaras from the shop down the street, and teach them how to use sex as a weapon and Google-stalk ex-boyfriends. We’d have tea parties, of course, and once we perfected our manners we would take field trips to places like the Plaza or Serendipity, or hell, even American Girl, just to show off our raised pinky fingers. Had I known that my girl time was going to be so fleeting, I would have let Cleo wear that damn pink princess tutu to school every day if that was what her little heart desired.
Instead, I am awash in a sea of camouflage. I step lightly through my apartment in four-inch heels, as careful as a bomb defuser in a minefield, trying to avoid the neck-breaking toys scattered everywhere. Some items I recognize—bikes, skateboards, Rollerblades: typical childhood fare. Others scare the bejesus out of me, like the thing that has three wheels and requires swaying hips to propel it, and the sneakers with the hidden wheels that seem to pop up only at busy intersections and always at the moment when the light turns yellow midway through the crossing. I’m quite fond of the full-size scooters that fold up into sleek bundles worthy of Inspector Gadget, but these objects are more usually found perilously leaning against a wall, ready to slip into my path and carve a gash
