CHAPTER TEN
Working toward
Something
A little more than a
week later, Tyler graduated from MCS. The Monday after, I was in
the store with the relentless Tab and a guy named Craig who didn’t
work a lot of hours but who we’d pressed into duty to take Tyler’s
shift and help with some shipments. A little before 11:00, Tyler
walked through the door.
“What are you doing
here?” I said.
“I’m on today,
right?” he said, looking a little confused.
“You’re on, yes, but
I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”
“Did we talk about
this?”
“No, we didn’t talk
about this, but I’m assuming you did some major partying last
night.”
Tyler rolled his
eyes. “Man, you have no idea.”
“Then what the hell
are you doing here?”
“I’m on today,
right?”
“Never
mind.”
“Hey, I’ve got other
stuff I can do if you don’t need us all here,” Tab
said.
I turned to Tab and
smirked. “That’s really selfless of you.” I looked back to Tyler.
“You sure you’re okay to work? I have Craig here. I sort of assumed
you weren’t going to answer the bell.”
Tyler did a quick bit
of shadowboxing and said, “Yep. I got three hours of sleep. I’m
ready to rumble.”
He walked behind the
counter and I sent Tab off to reorganize the stationery section.
With the school year over and the summer coming on, my father
always reduced the space he gave to notebooks and three-ring
binders and increased the space dedicated to water guns (new
shipment arriving Wednesday), Frisbees, and other plastic toys. Tab
responded to this merchandising task with the same ennui she
afforded all other responsibilities in the store. While I could
hardly blame her for expressing boredom at her job, I wondered if
anything ever excited her.
When Tab skulked off,
I shook Tyler’s hand. “So, congratulations.”
“Thanks,” he said,
smiling. “You know, it’s not like I won some big championship or
something. I mean, it was inevitable. I knew I was going to
graduate. But yesterday still felt really good.”
“It
should.”
“Yeah, I guess it
should. I just didn’t expect the little jolt I got when I went up
to get my diploma. It’s only MCS and everything, but it
was summa cum laude and, I don’t know,
the whole thing just got to me a little bit.”
I patted him on the
shoulder. I knew that he took his schoolwork much more seriously
than he needed to in order to get by and I was glad that he wasn’t
taking this accomplishment nonchalantly. “That’s good. You should
be proud of yourself.”
“Yeah, I
am.”
A customer came to
the counter and I rang up the sale before turning back to Tyler.
“And then you had a killer party?”
“Killer parties. My parents held this bash for me right
after the ceremony. Lots of relatives and a bunch of friends and my
father running all over the kitchen.”
“Your father
cooks?”
“Only special
occasion stuff. It’s a thing with him. And yesterday, he made all
of his classics. I think he was excited about the
event.”
“Yeah, I know what
you’re talking about. Before his heart attack, my father was an
artist with a box of Raisin Bran.”
“Then my mother made
this insane speech that might have been the single most sentimental
five minutes ever experienced in human history. It was like she
edited together all of the gloppy messages in all of our cards. I
kept waiting for ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ to blast out of the CD player.
She started crying and that made me start to cry and, oh . . .” He
waved his hand to shoo away the memory. “It was pretty cool,
actually, though it convinced me that if I ever get married, I’m
going to elope.”
Tyler leaned against
the wall behind the counter and looked off for a moment. The speech
obviously meant a lot to him, as did his father’s frantic efforts
to make him several of his favorite dishes. I could only imagine
that it would.
“Anyway,” he said,
looking back at me, “this went on until the early evening. I’d been
planning on hanging around until everyone left, but when it became
clear that my Uncle Richie wasn’t going until all of the food and
all of the scotch was gone, I decided to make my exit. That’s when
things got a little crazy. I hooked up with a bunch of other people
who graduated with me and we went to Blum’s. You ever been
there?”
I shook my
head.
“It’s right on the
water and they have this back porch on the dock. The guy who owns
the place is the father of one of the guys I graduated with. He
closed off the porch for us and gave us total access to the bar for
as long as we wanted. Once the restaurant closed, the music got
extremely loud, the drinks came a lot faster, and the rest was kind
of a blur. There was something that went on with whipped cream and
I had this really profound walk down the beach with this woman I’ve
been trying to talk to since my sophomore year. I think she’s
leaving for Seattle this afternoon, but at least I got to talk to
her. Mr. Blum paid his staff to stick around and drive everyone
home and I think I crawled into bed around a quarter to seven. I
remembered to set my alarm, though.”
“Which wins you
Employee of the Month for the sixth time in a row.”
“Nah, give it to
Tab.” He nodded toward the stationery aisle, where she was piling
the notebooks on the floor one at a time.
“So now it’s back on
the interview trail?”
“I’m going into the
City on Friday. I have some stuff lined up and I’m hoping to get a
few more things going before then.”
“What’s the market
like right now?”
“Hey, when you’re a
summa cum laude graduate from MCS, you can write your own ticket,”
he said, smiling. “It’s okay. Nobody’s getting their doors beaten
down – even the people who graduated from Yale yesterday. It might
take me a little time to find something good, but I’ll find
something.”
“I’m sure you will.”
There was no question in my mind that someone would respond to
Tyler’s passion and determination and give him a decent entry-level
position. Tyler would be pleased and consider himself fortunate,
but it would be the employer who received the big
break.
“Hey, I got you
something,” I said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a
box. Though I seriously wasn’t expecting Tyler to be in the store,
I also knew that there was the very real possibility he’d show up,
since he hadn’t asked for the time off. I handed him the
package.
“Hey, you didn’t have
to do that,” he said.
“It isn’t a car or
anything. By the way, my mother and father wanted me to tell you
that they’re getting you something, too, but that they still
haven’t found the right thing.”
“That’s really nice
of them.” Tyler tore at the wrapping. Inside was a box of four CDs
I’d recorded for him of live performances from many of the bands
we’d talked about when we’d gone out for drinks.
“Wow, this is
incredible,” he said.
“I’ve been doing a
lot of downloading, ripping, and burning since our night at the
Cornwall.”
“A seventeen-minute
version of ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy? ’”
“I hadn’t even heard
that one myself until I searched for some vintage
Traffic.”
“This is really good
stuff. I can’t wait to listen to some of it in my car during my
lunch break.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll
sneak off with you then. I’d let you put it on through the store’s
system, but I’m pretty sure my father has attack dogs at the ready
in case we try to change his station.”
Since she moved to
the other side of Amber about twenty years ago, my mother’s younger
sister Rita has held a Memorial Day party. As the two oldest
cousins on this side of the family, Chase and I would get the other
kids to do all kinds of precarious and sometimes dangerous things
involving rowboat oars, bug zappers, and, as we got older,
purloined cans of beer and bottles of rum. As May dawned, we would
begin to strategize that year’s stunt, even planning escape routes
if things went badly. I hadn’t been to one of these gatherings
since Chase died and I hadn’t intended to go this year, either.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good enough excuse for staying
away and my mother was surprisingly insistent.
Before moving to
Amber, my Aunt Rita was a First Wave corporate executive at a
public relations firm in Manhattan. By the time she was thirty,
she’d used a combination of talent, guile, and utter determination
to earn a partnership. The same year, her husband, an even more
avid corporate climber than she, received a senior vice president’s
position at a Hartford insurance company. From what I hear (since I
understood virtually none of this at the time), a rather tense
standoff ensued. Uncle Chad saw this offer as one he couldn’t
refuse while Aunt Rita considered it a violation of their pact to
think that she would give up her career for his. In the end, Aunt
Rita’s cleverness prevented their marriage from being an innocent
victim in this war of ambitions. She found a way to retain her
partnership while handling most of her duties from her spectacular
new home office in her spectacular new home with three acres on the
water in Amber, Connecticut, less than ten minutes from her beloved
sister Anna. As time went by, Chad ultimately became president of
that insurance company and Rita found that she could make as much
money with far fewer hassles by striking out on her own. These days
she doesn’t work nearly as hard as she once did, but she “keeps her
hand in the business” and still handles some high-powered
clients.
All of which is
reflected in Chad and Rita’s living space. The three-car garage
(one for the roadster, none for the kids who had moved on to
careers of their own), hand-carved dining table that expanded to
seat eighteen, and professional kitchen were nearly obligatory. But
the freeform, oxygen-filtered swimming pool, the multilevel
fieldstone patio, and the hydroponic garden were all nice touches.
They’d put in all of these since the last time I’d walked the
grounds, and I examined each with a mixture of admiration and
consternation as the party got underway.
It had been
considerably less difficult to get my father out of the house for
this event than I’d expected. With the exception of doctor’s
visits, he hadn’t been in the car since coming home from the
hospital. He made a huge display of getting dressed. He sent my
mother up the stairs four times for different shirts and it took
him an absurd amount of time to descend the three stairs on the
house’s front stoop. But he was otherwise compliant.
Only when we got to
my aunt and uncle’s house did I realize why he had agreed to come
along. Chad’s brother, Thomas, had suffered a heart attack a couple
of years earlier. After perfunctory conversation with a few of the
other guests, my father and Thomas settled into chaise lounges on
the patio for the rest of the day, trading coronary stories like
war veterans. It was hard to believe that they had that much to say
(and several times I looked over to find both of them glancing off
at the party silently) and it was even harder to believe that my
father had been storing these observations until he could
commiserate with one of his fellows. He’d said more in those hours
than he’d said since returning from the hospital.
My mother was Rita’s
only sibling. In addition to Thomas, though, Chad had three other
brothers – Marlon, Henry, and Preston – all of whom had children at
various ages in proximity to mine. Since Rita and Chad held regular
family functions while I was growing up, these children became
unofficial “cousins” with whom Chase and I would entertain
ourselves. A few even became friends, though I’d done little more
than exchange e-mail with any of them in the last ten
years.
I was standing by
myself over near the garden when Liz walked up to me. She was
Preston’s oldest child, around four years younger than me. I
remember when I was sixteen and she was twelve, she followed me all
over the house during Aunt Rita’s Christmas party. I found this –
and her – terribly annoying. When I was twenty and she was sixteen,
however, I no longer found her annoying and in fact considered her
polished, intriguing, and sexy. Sadly, she was toting around a
boyfriend who was a freshman at Amherst. We hadn’t seen each other
at all since Chase’s funeral.
“There was a rumor
that you were going to be here,” she said as she
approached.
“Rumor? Don’t you
mean warning?”
“Oh yes, that must
have been it.” She kissed me on the cheek and held my hand for a
minute, smiling.
“You look great,” I
said. “What have you been up to?”
“A few things,” she
said, still smiling. “You know, things. You look good, too. More
rugged or something.”
“Thanks. So what have
you been doing? You’re allowed to tell me, aren’t you? It doesn’t
involve the CIA or anything like that, does it?”
Liz laughed. “Hardly.
I’m not the high adventure type. Just a bunch of stuff. I’m living
in Boston now, doing arbitrage work. The usual MBA thing. Sixty
hours a week, dating people from the office because they’re the
only guys I ever get to meet, share in a summer place on Cape Cod,
the usual.”
“You like
it?”
Liz laughed again and
brushed her straight black hair away from her face. “Yeah, I really
do. I mean, there are days, you know? And of course, they don’t pay
me nearly as much as I think they should pay me and my bonuses
aren’t nearly as high as I think they should be. But it’s exciting.
And my boss is a genius. And I’m learning something every day. And
I’m on a partnership track, so that’s pretty good,
too.”
I nodded. Somewhere
along the line, someone had directed Liz to loosen up a little and
it served her well. Where she was once more dignified than any
teenager should be, she seemed to be living in the world
now.
“So what have you
been up to?” she said. “Where are you living?”
“At the moment, if
you can believe it, I’m living here in Amber with my parents. But
it is a very temporary thing.”
“I heard that your
dad was sick. Are you helping to take care of him?”
“He doesn’t need
nearly as much care as he seems to think he needs.” I looked across
to the patio where he and Thomas were once again telling tales to
each other. “I actually got steamrollered into taking care of his
stationery store while it’s on the market. You don’t happen to know
a buyer, do you?”
“Sorry. That’s really
nice of you. How can you afford to take the time off work? I’d
never be able to do something like that.”
“I just finished up a
thing in Springfield, so I was actually available.”
“‘Finished up a
thing?’ You mean like an independent contractor
thing?”
“No, like a job I
hated thing.”
She nodded her head
slowly. I wasn’t sure whether this meant that she sympathized or
that she was having trouble processing the
information.
“You were planning to
work in the media, weren’t you?” she asked.
“That was a long time
ago. I’ve since found that there are all kinds of things you can do
with three-quarters of a communications degree.”
“You never finished
college?”
“Some things came up.
So do you have a town-house in Back Bay?”
“High-rise. The only
way I can get myself to the gym is if it’s in my building. And with
the hours I work, I kind of like having a doorman. Are you working
toward something now?”
“I’m working toward
the Southwest, ever so slowly. Do you know anything about
Tucumcari?”
“Is that a
company?”
“It’s a town.
According to a Web site, it’s my ideal place to live in New
Mexico.”
She nodded a little
faster this time (only a little, though) and glanced over toward
the patio. “What are you going to do there?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll find out when I get there. Hey, maybe it’ll be something with
the media and I’ll fulfill my destiny.”
She smiled thinly.
“They’re putting out the buffet. I think I’m going to get some
food.”
“Yeah, I’ll see you
later.” I watched her walk away until two little boys and a little
girl kicking a ball and laughing diverted my attention. I looked
out on the wide expanse of open lawn that led down to the water to
see people talking, a man tossing a giggling baby in the air, two
older teens running toward the river, a woman and her daughter
playing catch, and various others making their way toward the patio
and the food.
I grabbed a beer and
walked around the house to the street. The conversation with Liz
had unnerved me a little. Not as much because she seemed so
casually dismissive about what I was doing with my life as that it
yanked a period in my past from suspended animation. During that
period when Chase and I saw Liz and the other “cousins” frequently,
we were nothing but potential. Smart kids for the most part, raised
in material comfort, believing that we only had to choose a future
in order for that future to arise. When I lost contact with these
people, I fixed them at that stage in my mind. Occasionally, my
mother would mention one or the other, but the update didn’t mean
anything to me. Seeing Liz made palpable what I of course
understood at some level: that all of these people had moved on to
what they were doing with their lives. Including me.
The houses were very
far apart in this neighborhood and most were set well back from the
street. It was unnaturally quiet here. I’d hear the occasional
splash, a lawn mower in the distance, a car passing. But all I
could imagine when I looked at these houses was that every one of
them held families just like Rita and Chad’s: an Ivy League
educated daughter and son visiting from Manhattan and Philadelphia
respectively, where they were stepping up their own ladders with an
alacrity that astounded their parents.
I hadn’t paid enough
attention to my instincts to stay away from this party. As my
mother was trying to convince me to come, I’d known that I should
explain to her that it didn’t feel right. But I’d been more
reluctant to turn her down about anything lately, feeling like I’d
done a little too much of that since I got back to Amber. I should
have been more insistent. I didn’t need more frustration at this
stage.
When I got back to
the house, I thought about getting in my car and driving off. I’d
at least had the presence of mind to drive here in my own car
rather than going with my parents. But I knew that disappearing
from the party would be more insulting to them than not going in
the first place.
In the backyard, some
of the partygoers were organizing a game of volleyball. Rita and
Chad’s son, Marshall, called out to me to join them. I wanted to
play volleyball about as much as I wanted to monitor my father’s
conversations with Thomas, but again I didn’t feel I could refuse.
I took a place in the middle row and hoped things would be over
quickly.
Our team was awful.
It included my aunt, someone’s six-year-old son, and Chad’s
lumbering brother Marlon, among others. The only athletic-looking
person on the team was a girl I imagined to be somewhere in her
mid-teens.
None of this mattered
when we were just batting the ball around and none of it should
have mattered at all. But when we started playing a game and we
started losing badly, I became very agitated. Several people were
watching and laughing over our ineptitude and I found myself taking
this personally. When the score reached 15 – 4, I decided to do
something about it. I ran from the back row to spike a ball over
the net. I stopped passing to anyone other than the teen girl. I
exhorted my teammates like Michael Jordan in the NBA finals, even
as I did everything I could to prevent them from touching the ball.
Marshall was drinking a beer while setting up shots on the other
side, but I was prowling the court, pent on ramming the ball back
at him. We scored nine consecutive points until a shot ricocheted
off Marlon’s considerable belly. We took back the serve
immediately, though, and won every point after that even as most of
my teammates moved toward the boundaries. On the game-winning
point, the teen girl set me up with a great pass and I spiked it
right into Preston’s face. His sunglasses came flying off and he
sat down on the grass.
“Jeez, Hugh, did you
have money on this game?” Marshall said angrily, while going to his
uncle’s side. Liz knelt down next to her father and then she and
Marshall helped him up. As she did so, she turned to me with an
expression that read, “This is what you’re doing with your
life?”
I stood on the other
side of the net as everyone left the volleyball court. I wanted to
leave, but I didn’t want anyone to see me leave. As the action
swirled around me, my aunt walked over and took me by the
arm.
“Had those
competitive juices really flowing, huh?” she said.
My embarrassment
inched up. “I guess so.”
“Preston’s fine. His
idea of physical exertion is pressing the intercom button for his
secretary. I think you just caught him by surprise.”
We started walking
away from the patio and toward a bench overlooking the river. When
we sat down, my aunt released my arm and patted me on the
leg.
“I haven’t seen much
of you since you’ve been back,” she said. In fact, I’d only seen
her once, when she visited my father after he came
home.
“I’ve been pretty
busy,” I said, though I hardly ever felt busy.
“It’s good of you to
help your father out.”
“It came at the right
time.”
She patted my leg
again. “It’s still good of you to do it. I feel so badly for
Richard.”
I nodded and looked
around. There wasn’t anyone within fifty yards of us.
“So what are you
doing with yourself these days?” she said.
“I’ve been spending a
lot of time in the store. Other than that, I don’t know, some time
with Mom and Dad, some time with John Updike, a couple of long
drives.”
“I meant what are you
doing? Anna told me that you aren’t
going back to Springfield. What are you going to do once they sell
the store?”
I’m sure it had
something to do with the setting, that my aunt was a financially
successful woman married to a financially successful man who had
four financially successful brothers, but the afternoon’s
preoccupation with what one (and more specifically, what I) did had
worn me ragged. “I haven’t really focused on that yet,” I said
dismissively.
“When will it be time
to focus?”
I turned my body to
face her, which also moved her hand from my leg. “It’ll be time to
focus when it’s time. I’ve managed to get by so far.”
“The firm would have
had my ass if I’d ever approached my work that way,” she said,
looking out toward the water.
“That’s one of the
reasons I don’t work for a firm.”
“I didn’t realize
that had to do with ‘reasons.’”
I could have
continued to defend myself, though I was certain I could never
convinced her to see the world from my perspective. Instead, I
decided to turn my attention to a sailboat out on the
river.
“I was thinking this
morning about all of the mischief your brother used to cause at
this function,” she said. “He was such a ball of fire. Chad and I
would actually try to guess what kind of prank he was going to
pull. He was such an electric soul. Both of you were back
then.”
A pair of geese flew
across the river and I looked up at them.
“Do you think Chase
would have figured out what to focus on by now?” she
said.
I watched the geese
recede into the distance. “I’m sure he would have, Aunt
Rita.”
She stood up. “I’m
sure he would have, too.”
She walked away while
I continued to look out on the river. I was as alien to this
environment as a komodo dragon. The lizard, however, would be
regarded as a curiosity and at least generate some fascination. I
seemed only to generate contempt, disappointment, and a modicum of
unwanted pity.
A ball came toward my
bench and a young boy raced after it. When I looked at him, he
offered me a nervous smile and then ran back to his playmates. A
short while later, without saying good-bye to my parents or my
aunt, or any of the cousins, I left the party.