I sing softly into her ear. I sing, “By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song and celebration.”
“Stop that,” she says, batting the song away as if it was a taunting crow. Her silver bracelets click. “If there’s one thing I never expected to end up as,” she says, “it’s an old hippie.”
“There are, you know, worse things to end up as,” I say.
“It’s too late,” she says. “The butterflies are turning back into bombers. Haven’t you noticed? They’re going to build condos on that mountain, take my word for it.”
“I don’t think they will. I don’t think there’d be enough customers.”
She looks at the mountains as if the future was written there in small, bright letters. She squints. For a moment she could be a country woman, all sinew and suspicion, and never mind about her lipstick or her chartreuse shirt. She could be my mother’s mother, standing on the edge of her Wisconsin holdings and looking out disapprovingly at the vastness of what she doesn’t own.
“As long as there are enough customers for the Home Cafe. Christ, I still can’t believe we decided to call it that.”
“People’ll love it,” I say.
“Oh, this is all just so weird. It’s so outdated and—weird.”
“Well, it sort of is,” I say.
“No ‘sort of’ about it.”
She is so bitter and hard, so much like her revised self, that a rogue spasm of happiness rises up in me. She’s so real; so
She says, “I’m glad one of us feels good about all this.”
“Aw, darling, what’s not to feel good about?” I say. “We’re
“It would be nice if that were true,” she says.
“You know what I’d like to do someday? I’d like to fix up the shed as a separate little house, so Alice could move up here when she gets tired of the catering business.”
“Oh, sure. Let’s build a cottage for my old fourth-grade teacher, too.”
“Clare?” I say.
“Mm-hm?”
“You really are happy here, aren’t you? I mean, this is our life. Right?”
“Oh, sure it is. It’s our life. You know me, I think in terms of complaint. It’s how my mind works.”
“Right,” I say.
We stand watching the mountains, then turn to watch the house. This house is so old the spirits themselves have melted into the walls. It feels inhabited not by anyone’s private unhappiness but by the collected days of ten generations, their meals and fights, their births and last gasps. Now, right now, it’s a disreputable marriage of old and new disappointments. The floorboards are crumbling, and the remodeled kitchen seethes with orange linoleum and Spanish-style wood-like cabinets. We’re going to fix it up, slowly, with the money we make from our restaurant. We are forces of order, come from the city with talents and tools and our belief in a generous future. Jonathan and Clare look at the house and see what it can become. They talk antique fixtures, eight-over-eights, a limestone mantel rescued from a house in Hudson and trucked up here. Although I wouldn’t fight progress I like the house as it is, with bug-riddled floors and wood-grain chemical paneling that looks like sorrow and laziness made into a domestic fixture. Sitting on its four overgrown acres, the house answers the elderly mountains. It, too, is docile and worn smooth. It has been humbled by time.
“I’ve been thinking,” Clare says. “What if we painted the windowpanes blue? Like a cobalt blue, you know? Do you think that’d look too cutesy?”
“Ask Jonathan,” I answer. “He’s the one who knows about things like that.”
She nods. “Bobby?” she says.
“Uh-huh?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I walk around the place and I feel like I’m standing on an airplane wing. At thirty thousand feet. I guess I want you and Jonathan to think this is as strange as I do.”
From the house, the baby starts crying. “That’s what really does it,” Clare says. “I’ve always just made my own mistakes, I never had to worry about somebody else like this before.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s fine and perfect. Trust me. Okay?”
She nods uncertainly. She keeps losing the battle to decide instead of worry. Worry is part of what makes her short-tempered; she is trying to develop a personality to match her worst expectations.
“Let’s go see how Jonathan’s doing with her,” she says.
“Okay. Sure.”
We go into the house together. The door opens straight into the living room, a big shabby rectangle still papered in scowling red eagles and blue drums. At this time of day it’s filled with squares of light that slant in from three sides. Jonathan is walking a circle with Rebecca propped on his shoulder. She wails, a series of short piercing cries like mortified hiccups.
“Mystery tantrum,” he says. “Her diaper’s fine, and she just ate half an hour ago.”
“Let me try with her,” Clare says.
Jonathan fails to hide his reluctance. He dislikes giving the baby up, even to her own dreams. But when Clare holds out her arms he passes her over.
Clare folds her in, whispers to her. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says. “What’s the matter? Just a little fit of existential despair?”
Rebecca is a twenty-pound being with feathery hair and dark, furious eyes. Already, at eleven months, she has a nature. She is prone to contemplation. She resists both laughter and sorrow until they overwhelm her, and then she gives herself up completely.
Clare walks the living room with her, whispering. She speaks to the baby the same way she speaks to Jonathan or me, in full sentences, but she speaks to the baby without an undercurrent of rage.
“Now, Miss Rebecca,” she says, “you’re not being reasonable. But, hey, why should you be? Lord, if I ever start nagging you to be reasonable, will you shoot me, please?”
Jonathan watches in an ecstasy of edgy affection. Parenthood has brought several surprises—the biggest is his tortured devotion. Clare and I are calmer in the face of Rebecca’s fragility and her unending needs. Jonathan hasn’t rested since she entered the world. He is a living illustration of love’s power to unsettle our nerves.
Now he has something vital to lose. Now there is a small victim for every tragic story he can tell himself.
Rebecca won’t be quiet, and we take her outside. She is lost in crying the way a motorboat gets lost in sound and spray. We walk the property with her, and let her cries dissipate in the noon air. Jonathan picks a daisy. He twirls it in front of her pinched red face.
“Hey, kid,” he says. “Hey. Take a look at this amazing, unprecedented thing here.” Of all her qualities, Jonathan is most in love with her capacity for amazement. He almost weeps when she stares goggle-eyed at a yarn ball or a teaspoon cupping the sun. But she keeps crying, right into the daisy.
“Can’t be bought with flowers,” Clare says. There is true pride in her voice. If Jonathan loves her for being the world’s best audience, Clare loves her stubborn insistence on her own mysteries.
We walk into the stand of trees behind the house. Here, in the endless shade, there is no grass to speak of. There is only forest trash—pine cones and shed branches, the droppings of deer. We walk among the silent trees with Rebecca’s noise trailing behind us like a glittery scarf.
Clare asks, “Did you boys call the plumber today?”
“Yep,” Jonathan says. “He can’t fit us in until two weeks from Tuesday. Why don’t you let me try with her again?”
“Shit. This house isn’t going to be done until the next century. You know that, don’t you?”
“No big rush,” Jonathan says. “Come here, Rebecca.”
He reaches for her, but Clare maintains her hold. “No big rush,” she says. “So we’ll just keep heating water on the stove for the rest of our lives?”
