Chapter 5 #3
“Not really,” Stem said cheerfully. He gave off the scent of Dial soap as he crossed the room to a chair. “How’re you doing, Aunt Merrick?”
“I’m exhausted, I was just saying,” Merrick told him. “It seems preparing for a trip gets more tiring every year.”
“Why not stay home, then?”
“What!” she said in horror. Then she sat up straighter; Denny was bringing the drinks.
In one hand he held a tumbler tinkling with ice and filled to the brim with vodka, and in the other a glass of white wine.
Three cans of beer were tucked perilously under his left arm.
“Here we go,” he said. He placed the tumbler on the lamp table next to her.
He crossed to give Abby the wine and then handed a can of beer each to Red and Stem, after which he sat down on the couch with the third can and popped the tab. “Cheers,” he said.
Merrick took a deep swig of her drink and breathed out a long “Ahh.” She asked Denny, “Is Sarah here too?”
“Who’s Sarah?”
“Sarah your daughter.”
“Susan, you mean.”
“Susan, Sarah … Is Susan here too?”
“She’s coming down for the beach trip.”
“Oh, God, not that everlasting beach trip,” Merrick said. “You’re like lemmings about that beach! Or spawning salmon, or something. Don’t you all ever think about vacationing any place else?”
“We love the beach,” Abby told her.
“Really,” Merrick said, and she drew her sharp purple fingernails languidly across the top of Heidi’s head. “Sometimes it amazes me that our ancestors had the gumption to make it to America,” she told Red.
“Excuse me?”
“America!” she shouted.
Red looked confused.
“Mother and Father never traveled at all, if you’ll remember,” she told him.
“Well, you have certainly made up for that,” Red said. “You seem to need more than one house, even.”
“What can I say? I hate winter.”
“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”
“Are you calling Baltimore summers the easy part?” Merrick asked. Then, as if to prove her point, she said “Whew!” and left off petting Heidi to bat a hand in front of her face. “Can somebody turn that fan up a notch?”
Stem rose and gave the fan cord a tug.
“I can see why you might want two houses,” Denny spoke up. “Or even more than two. I get that. I bet sometimes when you wake in the morning you don’t know where you are for a moment, am I right? You’re completely disoriented.”
“Well … I guess,” Merrick said.
“Before you open your eyes you think, ‘Why does it feel like the light is coming from my left? I thought the window was on my right. Which house is this, anyway?’ Or you get out of bed at night to go pee and you walk into a wall. ‘Whoa!’ you say. ‘Where’s the bathroom gone?’ ”
Merrick said, “Well …” and Abby took on a worried look. Evidently Denny was having one of his unexpectedly confiding moments.
“I love that feeling,” he said. “You don’t know your place in the world; you’re not pegged; you’re not nailed into this one single same old never-ending spot.”
“I suppose,” Merrick said.
“You think that might be the reason people travel?” he asked. “I’ll bet it could be. Is that why you travel?”
“Oh, well, it’s more like I’m just trying to get as far as possible from Trey’s mother,” Merrick said.
She swirled the ice in her glass. “The old bat just celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday,” she told Red.
“Can you believe it? Queen Eula the Immortal. I swear, I think she’s staying alive just to spite me.
It’s not only that she’s a pill herself; I blame her for making Trey such a pill.
She spoiled that man rotten, I tell you.
Gave him every little thing he ever wanted: the Prince of Roland Park. ”
Red put a hand to his forehead and said, “This is so eerie! Is it déjà vu? Why do I feel like I’ve heard this someplace before?”
“And the older he gets, the worse he gets,” she went on obliviously. “Even when he was young he was a hopeless hypochondriac, but now! Believe me, it was a dark day in the universe when the Internet started letting people research their medical symptoms.”
She might have gone on (she usually did), but at that moment Petey came into the room. “Grandma,” he said, “can we have the last of that fudge ripple?”
“What: before supper?” Abby asked.
“We’re already eating our supper.”
“Yes, you can have it. And take Heidi when you go, will you? She’s sneezing again.”
It was true that Heidi had started sneezing—a whole fit of sneezes, light but spattery. “Gesundheit,” Merrick told her. “What’s the trouble, honeybunch? Coming down with something?”
“She does this all day long,” Abby said. “You wouldn’t suppose sneezing would be such an irritation, but it is.”
Petey said, “Mom thinks it’s on account of she’s allergic to Grandma’s rugs.”
“Well, I wouldn’t bring her to visit, then, poor baby,” Merrick said.
“She’s got to visit. She lives here.”
“Heidi lives here?”
“She lives here with us.”
“You live here?”
“Yes, and Sammy’s allergic, too. All night he breathes dramatically.” Merrick looked at Abby.
“Take Heidi to the kitchen, Petey,” Abby said. “Yes,” she told Merrick, “they’ve moved in to help out; isn’t that nice?”
“Help out with what?”
“Well, just … you know. We’re getting older!”
“I’m getting older too, but I haven’t turned my house into a commune.”
“To each his own, I guess!” Abby sang out merrily.
“Wait,” Merrick said. “Is there something someone’s not telling me? Has one of you been diagnosed with some terminal disease?”
“No, but after Red’s heart attack—”
“Red had a heart attack?”
“You knew that. You sent him a fruit basket in the hospital.”
“Oh,” Merrick said. “Yes, maybe I did.”
“And I’m not so spry either, lately.”
“This is ridiculous,” Merrick said. “Two people get a bit wobbly and their entire family moves in with them? I never heard of such a thing.”
Denny cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “Stem is not here on a permanent basis.”
“Well, thank heaven.”
“I am.”
Merrick looked at him, waiting for him to go on. The others stared down at their laps.
“I’m the one who’s staying,” Denny said.
Stem said, “Well, not—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, why is anyone staying?” Merrick asked. “If your parents are really so decrepit—and I must say I find that hard to believe; they’re barely in their seventies—they should move to a retirement community. That’s what other people do.”
“We’re too independent for a retirement community,” Red told her.
“Independent? Bosh. That’s just another word for selfish. It’s stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens.”
Stem rose to his feet. “Well,” he said, “I guess Nora must be fretting about her supper getting cold,” and he stood waiting in the center of the room.
Everyone looked at him in surprise. Finally Merrick said, “Oh, I see. Clear that tiresome woman out of here; she tells too many home truths.” But she was standing up as she spoke, draining the last of her drink as she moved toward the front hall. “I know, I know,” she said. “I see how it is.”
The others rose to follow her. “Here,” Merrick said at the door, and she thrust her empty glass at Abby. “And by the way,” she told Denny. “You’re supposed to have a life by now. You’re only putting things off, scurrying back home on the slightest excuse.”
She left, clicking across the porch with a brisk, energetic stride, like someone triumphant in the knowledge that she had set everybody straight.
“What is she talking about?” Denny asked after a moment.
Abby said, “Oh, you know how she is.”
“I can’t abide that woman.”
Ordinarily Abby would have tut-tutted, but now she just sighed and headed for the kitchen.
The men went into the dining room and settled at the table, none of them speaking, although Red did say, as he dropped onto his chair, “Ah, me.” They waited in a kind of drained silence.
From the kitchen they could hear the burble of the little boys’ voices and a clatter of utensils.
Then Nora emerged through the swinging door, carrying a casserole.
Abby came behind with a salad. “You should see Merrick’s leftovers,” she told the men.
“A smidgen of store-bought pasta sauce in the bottom of a jar. A wedge of Brie completely hollowed out inside the rind. And … what else, Nora?” she asked.
“A cold broiled lamb chop,” Nora said, setting the casserole on the table.
“A lamb chop, yes, and a Chinese take-out carton of rice, and one single, solitary pickle in a bottle of scummy brine.”
“We should put her in touch with Hugh,” Denny said.
“Hugh?” Abby asked.
“Amanda’s Hugh. Do Not Pass Go. She could call him before every trip.”
“Oh, you’re right,” Abby said. “They’re made for each other!”
“He’d tell her he knows a soup kitchen that’s dying to have her leftovers, and he’d come by her house and collect them and take them off to the trash.”
This made the others laugh—even Nora, a little. Red said, “Oh, now. You folks,” but he was laughing too.
“What?” Tommy asked. He’d cracked open the door from the kitchen. “What’s so funny?”
None of them wanted to say; they just smiled and shook their heads. To a child, they must have looked like some happy, cozy club that only grown-ups could belong to.