would have been like my daughter’s in those years: Beatles posters, or maybe of the Monkees, and prize ribbons for horsemanship in local shows. And dolls and Steiff animals that hadn’t been put away yet sharing the shelves with Signet editions of Melville and
Hard Times
and Camus assigned at day school. We were all so young, parents and children, learning it all together—how to grow up, how to deal with time—is what you realize now.
Those were the days when Harry Langhorne had got himself a motorcycle and would roar around and around the green on a Saturday night until the police came and stopped him, more or less politely. And the Wilcombes had put a hot tub on their second-story porch and had to run a steel column up for support lest we all go tumbling down naked some summer night. In winter, there was a lot of weekend skiing for the sake of the kids, and we would take over a whole lodge in New Hampshire: heaps of snowy boots and wet parkas in the corner under the moose head, over past the beat-up player piano, and rosy cheeks at dinner at the long tables, where ham with raisin sauce was always the main dish. Suddenly the girls, long-legged in their stretch pants, hair whipping around their faces as they skimmed to a stop at the lift lines, were women. At night, after the boys had crumped out or settled to Ping-Pong in the basement, the girls stayed up with us, playing Crazy Eights or Spit with the tattered decks the lodge kept on hand, taking sips from our cans of beer, until at last the weight of all that day’s fresh air toppled everyone up toward bed, in reluctant bunches. The little rooms had dotted-swiss curtains and thick frost ferns on the windowpanes. The radiators dripped and sang. There was a dormitory feeling through the thin partitions, and shuffling and giggling in the hall on the way to the bathrooms, one for girls and one for boys. One big family. It was the children, really, growing unenthusiastic and resistant, who stopped the trips. That, and the divorces as they began to add up. Margaret and I are about the last marriage left; she says maybe we missed the boat, but can’t mean it.
The beach picnics, and touch football, and the softball games in that big field the Wilcombes had. Such a lot of good times, and the kids growing up through them like weeds in sunshine; and now, when the daughters of people we hardly knew at all are married to stockbrokers or off in Oregon beingnurses or in Mexico teaching agronomy, our daughters haunt the town as if searching for something they missed, taking classes in macramé or aerobic dancing, living with their mothers, wearing no makeup, walking up beside the rocks with books in their arms like a race of little nuns.
You can see their mothers in them—beautiful women, full of life. I saw Annie Langhorne at the train station the other morning and we had to talk for some minutes, mostly about the antique store Mary Jo wants to open up with Betsey, and apropos of the hopelessness of this venture she gave me a smile exactly like her mother’s one of the times Louise and I said goodbye or faced the fact that we just weren’t going to make it, she and I—pushing up the lower lip so her chin crinkled, that nice wide mouth of hers humorous but down-turned at the corners as if to buckle back tears. Lou’s exact same smile on little Annie, and it was like being in love again, when all the world is a hunt and the sight of the woman’s car parked at a gas station or in the Stop & Shop lot makes your Saturday, makes your blood race and your palms go numb, the heart touching base.
But these girls. What are they hanging back for? What are they afraid of?
Unstuck
I N HIS DREAM , Mark was mixing and mixing on an oval palette a muddy shade of gray he could not get quite right, and this shade of gray was both, in that absurd but deadpan way of dreams, his marriage and the doctrinal position of the local Congregational church, which was resisting the nationwide merger
Hard Times
and Camus assigned at day school. We were all so young, parents and children, learning it all together—how to grow up, how to deal with time—is what you realize now.
Those were the days when Harry Langhorne had got himself a motorcycle and would roar around and around the green on a Saturday night until the police came and stopped him, more or less politely. And the Wilcombes had put a hot tub on their second-story porch and had to run a steel column up for support lest we all go tumbling down naked some summer night. In winter, there was a lot of weekend skiing for the sake of the kids, and we would take over a whole lodge in New Hampshire: heaps of snowy boots and wet parkas in the corner under the moose head, over past the beat-up player piano, and rosy cheeks at dinner at the long tables, where ham with raisin sauce was always the main dish. Suddenly the girls, long-legged in their stretch pants, hair whipping around their faces as they skimmed to a stop at the lift lines, were women. At night, after the boys had crumped out or settled to Ping-Pong in the basement, the girls stayed up with us, playing Crazy Eights or Spit with the tattered decks the lodge kept on hand, taking sips from our cans of beer, until at last the weight of all that day’s fresh air toppled everyone up toward bed, in reluctant bunches. The little rooms had dotted-swiss curtains and thick frost ferns on the windowpanes. The radiators dripped and sang. There was a dormitory feeling through the thin partitions, and shuffling and giggling in the hall on the way to the bathrooms, one for girls and one for boys. One big family. It was the children, really, growing unenthusiastic and resistant, who stopped the trips. That, and the divorces as they began to add up. Margaret and I are about the last marriage left; she says maybe we missed the boat, but can’t mean it.
The beach picnics, and touch football, and the softball games in that big field the Wilcombes had. Such a lot of good times, and the kids growing up through them like weeds in sunshine; and now, when the daughters of people we hardly knew at all are married to stockbrokers or off in Oregon beingnurses or in Mexico teaching agronomy, our daughters haunt the town as if searching for something they missed, taking classes in macramé or aerobic dancing, living with their mothers, wearing no makeup, walking up beside the rocks with books in their arms like a race of little nuns.
You can see their mothers in them—beautiful women, full of life. I saw Annie Langhorne at the train station the other morning and we had to talk for some minutes, mostly about the antique store Mary Jo wants to open up with Betsey, and apropos of the hopelessness of this venture she gave me a smile exactly like her mother’s one of the times Louise and I said goodbye or faced the fact that we just weren’t going to make it, she and I—pushing up the lower lip so her chin crinkled, that nice wide mouth of hers humorous but down-turned at the corners as if to buckle back tears. Lou’s exact same smile on little Annie, and it was like being in love again, when all the world is a hunt and the sight of the woman’s car parked at a gas station or in the Stop & Shop lot makes your Saturday, makes your blood race and your palms go numb, the heart touching base.
But these girls. What are they hanging back for? What are they afraid of?
Unstuck
I N HIS DREAM , Mark was mixing and mixing on an oval palette a muddy shade of gray he could not get quite right, and this shade of gray was both, in that absurd but deadpan way of dreams, his marriage and the doctrinal position of the local Congregational church, which was resisting the nationwide merger
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