CHAPTER 3 #10
“But you don’t usually do brunch.”
“No, no,” Eddie said. “Brunch is for you.”
“Eddie!” Polly called from somewhere offstage. “Come help me, please.”
Eddie looked back at me. “Come help me, please,” he said.
I followed him down the hall.
“Oh, Eddie,” Polly said, standing in the kitchen and looking only at me. “Now she’ll see the mess.”
“Daphne’s seen mess,” he said.
But there was no mess, only exuberant wallpaper and glass cupboards, wide marble countertops displaying platters of grilled chicken and shrimp, a sliced tenderloin, three different kinds of salad in bowls that must have been shipped over from Capri. “Who’s coming to lunch?”
“You’re coming!” Polly said. “This is a big day. Daphne Zabriskie returned to the fold. We’ll put out a spread for that.”
But that made it sound like I had left, marched off in a nine-year-old huff, only to return at fifty-three.
Why hadn’t I asked if I could bring Leda to brunch?
Surely they wanted to see both of the Zabriskie girls.
And Leda could have brought Steve and Henry since I’d brought Jonathan.
Fair is fair, and there was plenty of food. Instead I asked what I could carry.
“Eddie can take his drink,” she said, handing him a glass, a bright stalk of celery playing the role of swizzle stick, then she handed me two glasses and picked up two more herself. “It’s one for each of us and one for each of the husbands.”
Polly walked in front of us, a hostess in miniature, the proportions of her clothes precisely correct, ballet flats, narrow white pants, a boxy top in a dark pink, the color of certain carnations.
Framed photographs of her children and grandchildren lined the hall, beautiful people holding skis, holding tennis racquets, holding the bridles of horses.
I imagined they had all been invited to brunch. I imagined they declined.
“The thing about Augusta that no one factors is the heat,” Skip was saying when we came into the glass-fronted room with the staggering view of the bay.
“There was a time I could take it, but not now. Now I’d just as soon play Blind Brook.
Excellent course and I can finish off the day in my own shower. ”
Jonathan looked up at me. If he was in hell, his face did not betray him. “We’ve found the overlap,” he said, taking the drink from my hand.
“Watch out for that,” I said, but it didn’t matter. I could drive us home.
“Don’t be a killjoy,” Polly said, then raised her glass to me. “To lost lambs.”
“Baa, baa, baa,” Skip and Eddie sang together, and everyone laughed.
I took it back: the person I wished for in this moment wasn’t Leda, it was my mother.
My mother would down her Bloody Mary, then drag me to the kitchen to tell me she was appalled—appalled!
—and not only by the wallpaper and the square footage but by Polly’s obliviousness and Skip’s soul-dead acceptance, Eddie’s agreeableness.
It’s clearly some form of Stockholm syndrome, my mother would contend.
He’s so used to them that he can’t even see it anymore.
Then she would go back out to the sunporch and sit next to Eddie, holding his hand beneath the tablecloth.
My mother was a great one for giving voice to rage, something I would not get from Jonathan on the drive home.
The spread of hors d’oeuvres had been laid out on a low table in advance of our arrival—olives and cheese and onion dip and some sort of bright green dip, seeded breadsticks, homemade potato chips, some carrots and celery sticks that no one wanted.
Jonathan was asking Skip how he was managing his retirement.
“Why don’t you ask me?” Polly said. “Ask me how I’m managing Skip’s retirement.”
“I couldn’t have stayed another minute,” Skip said, crossing one long leg over the other, ankle to knee.
“The golden age is already twenty or thirty years behind us. Now the summer interns come to their interviews wanting to know what company policies are in place to support their work-life balance. Interns! Two years in they start asking questions about paternity leave and lactation suites. These are lawyers.” He shook his head. “It’s a different species.”
“Work-life balance,” Polly said, “means that he worked all those years and now he’s come home. That was work and this is life.”
Skip didn’t seem to hear her. “Not to get all nostalgic about hard work, but gone are the days of putting your head down on the desk for an hour if you happened to find yourself at the office come two a.m. on a Saturday night. That’s how it was done.
Plenty of people got upset about the money we made, but I’m here to tell you, we worked for it.
Same as the doctors.” He gestured to Jonathan, who was not a doctor.
“Am I right? Did you ever hear a surgeon in the eighties talk about his work-life balance? It didn’t exist, and the practice of medicine was better for it.
You’re here to save a human life, goddamn it.
That’s what men signed on for. What about you?
Getting out of hospital administration must have felt like running out of a burning building. Health care’s gone straight to hell.”
Jonathan gave his most affable shrug. “Oh, I don’t know. We were still doing good work.”
“Maybe so, but you’ve got the insurance companies, and then the uninsured on top of that. Together they’ll beat the incentive out of any living thing. You must have been glad to leave it behind.”
Was he glad? I looked at my husband. Are you glad?
Jonathan worked his celery stick around the inside of his half-empty glass. “I liked the work. But no one gets to do the job forever.”
Skip pointed at Eddie. “Except this one.”
Eddie had just put a potato chip with onion dip in his mouth, and so we waited while he chewed, then dabbed his lips with a napkin.
“I’ll have you know I was offered a buyout, and I declined to take it.
As our host has said on more than one occasion, my vocation doesn’t matter, so it stands to reason that it also doesn’t matter if I decide to keep doing it. ”
“Have you been to his apartment?” Skip asked me. “He lives like a graduate student. A whole lifetime of work for a one-bedroom.”
“There’s only one of me in there,” Eddie said.
“I gave him the money for the down payment. Had I known he was never going to leave, I would have found him a better place.”
“I paaaid you baaackk,” Eddie sang.
“Aren’t you sick of it by now?” Polly asked. She had eaten nothing, and her Bloody Mary, like my own, sweated on the glass table, untouched.
Eddie remained sanguine. “There are plenty of things I’m sick of that I continue to do,” he said cheerfully. “But I happen to like editing books. Anyway, I need the structure. Structure gives life meaning.”
Polly shook her head. “What about you?” she asked me. “You’re still working, aren’t you?”
I had no idea if Polly had ever had a job outside the home, but taking care of Skip and their children had no doubt been plenty. I nodded.
“Look at her,” Skip said, pointing his breadstick in my direction. “Of course she’s working. She’s a child. She should be working.”
I spent my days working with the fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old set, girls who thought of me as time’s own crone, so Skip’s perspective pleased me.
Age was a matter of comparison, and in this room I was young.
“No one’s offering buyouts for private school teachers.
And anyway, I love teaching literature.”
“Books, books, books.” Skip laughed. “The family obsession. Like father, like daughter.”
Every person in the room knew that Eddie was not my father, and we knew his calling me his daughter was nothing more than kindness, but Polly couldn’t let it stand. “How is your father?” she asked.
I told her my father was dead.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and said it genuinely. If she was trying to change the subject, she hadn’t meant to change it in that direction.
“It was a long time ago.”
“That’s how Daphne and I met,” Jonathan said, jumping in. “Her father was a patient at my hospital outside of Boston.”
Eddie took a sip of his drink. “What a nice man he was.”
A slight rearrangement of understanding took place among the people around the table. I felt the shift. “You knew Buddy Zabriskie?” Jonathan asked.
“I was married to his wife,” Eddie said. “I was the stepfather of his children.”
Jonathan nodded. “I’d just never thought about it.”
“Abigail had many feelings where Buddy was concerned, many large feelings, so when there were things that needed to be dealt with, they tended to go through me. Buddy and I got along fine. In fact, he came to see me a couple of times when I was in the hospital after Daphne and I were in our famous car accident. He would go to see Leda and then he would come upstairs to check on me.” Eddie looked at me then. “Your father was such a decent man.”
“I didn’t know her first husband came to see you,” Polly said. I wondered why it bothered me so much to hear Polly refer to my mother only as her.
“He did. He’d bring me a copy of the Globe, a couple of magazines.
I remember he brought me a Peter Matthiessen book called Men’s Lives, about fishing off the coast of Long Island.
I’m sure it had to do with the time in which I read it, but the book made a huge impression on me. All about impermanence.”
I could see my own hardback copy of that book on the living room shelf at home. I knew exactly where it was. “He gave it to me when I graduated from high school,” I said to Eddie. “He loved that book.” Buddy was full of surprises.
“He gave you a book about fishing for your high school graduation?” Polly asked, no doubt thinking of the gifts she’d assembled for her own children when they graduated from Choate.
“I was so close to calling him when it came time for me to leave the hospital,” Eddie said, though now he was speaking to himself.
“You were going to call Buddy?” I asked.