“You bouqht the doilies?”
He laughed.
“These crusts are perfect, Jack.”
“I’ve been practicing. Ice water is the key”
“The cheese in this is absolutely—”
“Yes, I know.”
“Everything’s still warm.”
He smiled and opened the champagne. The excess spilled into my mouth.
Who was he? What was he trying to do? He opened the fruit: the kiwi, the pomegranate, the kumquat. They bled on his hands. He lingered the sweet meat, placed it in my mouth.
It was easy to love Jack the cook — the way he fondled the fruit, how small and tender the peach looked in his hand. It was easy to love him — the smell of pears in his hair.
“Some ham?” he asked. I watched him carefully, his expertise at slicing, and fora moment I could picture this Jack with me fora long, long time, this sweet, attentive, undemanding Jack: Jack the pastry chef, Jack the sauce chef. I could imagine traveling with him to exotic lands for ingredients. I could picture him at the cocktail hour feeding me pitted olives from his fingers.
“I want to make things for you, Vanessa,” he said. “I want to keep you warm and safe. I love you, my dumpling, my clam cake, my oyster stew.”
“Oh, ham hocks,” I said, “I love you, too.”
Jack the drama teacher always wore a tweed jacket, had a long scarf wrapped around his neck, and sipped coffee. He taught me how to prepare for each role: how to breathe, how to relax each part of the body; he showed me the exercises to do to limber up. Jack the acting teacher gave me confidence. “There is no role you are incapable of playing, no role too difficult, no role too out of character,” he said, “if you work hard, if you concentrate. Build, in your imagination, the circumstances in which such an action could take place. You can invent anything you have to, anything you want. You can do it all.”
“But there are times I drift away, Jack — come in and out of my part, lose my concentration, become afraid.”
“That’s OK,” he said. “Keep working. Stretch your body and your mind. Get in shape.
“Do what you must to get at the truth, to see what is difficult, to see what you believe you cannot bear to see. There is no substitute for the truth.”
“Don’t miss your train,” my mother whispers. “Please go.”
“There is no substitute for pain,” she said. “There is no way to stay safe.”
I have never been to that white house on the coast of Maine where my mother went so often. She would venture far into that untouchable country for weeks, months sometimes, with hardly a word for those of us who waited. “Do you think we’ll ever get to that white house, Dad?” I’d ask, but he was not listening. I watched him as he painfully composed letters to my missing mother. He put so much effort into them — crossing out, underlining, adding paragraphs, arrows and asterisks everywhere, copying them over and over until they were perfect.
I thought of her there in those vacation tow ns of summer often: those towns of heat and water and bleached wood, the hydrangea bushes bowing their drowsy heads, the bicycles propped against the pale sheds; the striped umbrellas, the fish stands; the moths at the screen. A warm sea breeze blows through her hair. A beach ball forms a lovely arc behind her in the blue sky.
It was harder in winter. In winter she became lost to me. It was harder in winter to see her happy. I did not want to give her up under the hydrangeas or writing on the beach, I wanted her to stay there, but in winter it was different. In winter she probably stayed huddled next to a fire in her huge Icelandic sweater, a white mug of coffee in her hands. It must have been very cold. She was probably lonely way up there.
But I believe in that white house. I believe in those towns of perpetual summer. I believe in you, Camden, Bath, Castine, Wiscasett. I believe in your summer.
The mug turns to white flowers in her hand. The ocean wind warms. She is back in summer though it is December now. She hears the neighbors’ voices far off. The beach ball bounces in the sand. We chase after it, wave to her.
“Is that my sweet pea I see?” she sang out to me through the blossoms and the leaves and the light of the garden. “My hibiscus? My wisteria? My alyssum? My primrose?
“Sweet William, is that you?” she called to Fletcher, and my brother blushed.
“Is that my daffodil?” I chirped back to her through the Queen Anne’s lace she refused to weed out. “Is that my forget-me-not?” I giggled. “My lilac? My bluebell? My mimosa?”
“This mildness will kill us,” Jack says, shaking his head. “This summer haze we are forced to see everything through, even now.
“Jesus, Vanessa,” he laughs. “It will kill us.”
I always wanted to believe that someone like my mother would know what she needed and where she could go. But arriving sometimes in Maine and parting the musty curtain, or directing a taxi in Italian to some new address, or stepping onto the pavement and hearing a strange clock toll, she would realize in one terrible moment that she would not be able to stay She was afraid, uncomfortable, and she would be unable to work. Many times she’d turn right around and travel hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, back home.
“It was a foolish idea,” she would say to my father over a dinner it seemed he always had waiting for her. He never knew quite when to expect her, and I think he always hoped in part that she would stay where she had decided to go and in part that she would come home. She was a solitary traveler, her expectations rising high as she left the house, only to have the message reiterated: there are limits, places the architecture of your brain will not permit you to stay, to experience. It was a terrible message, she thought.
“You must have known from the beginning, Michael,” she sighed. My mother trusted my father implicitly and depended on him for advice of all kinds. “It was just another of my crazy schemes. You should have told me; I would have listened.” But she would not have listened, my father knew. He shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, Christine,” he said, smiling at her. He had let sadness go. He was happy just to see her sitting before him. She was back. He squeezed her hand. She was back.
But she is not back, Jack seems to be saving as he steps into the room. If a pen or a paper knife or a scissors had been handy, I think I would have killed him right there as he smiled and put the newspaper down in front of me.
From the paper I read that “despite the warm temperatures now, meteorologists say this will be the coldest winter in hundreds of years” and for some reason I believe it. “One theory is that volcanic eruptions in Mexico will have a drastic effect on the temperature. And,” it says, “it is a fact that months ago jet streams failed to migrate toward the Arctic and dissipate.
“There is cold water all over the Pacific,” I read to him, “from Japan to Alaska. And this configuration carries certain implications.”
Jack just moans. “I don’t know, Vanessa,” he says. His voice is thick and slow, a mirror of the weather. He puts his enormous hand gently on my neck, then smoothes the hair back from my face. He is sweating. He shakes his head. “Your mildness will kill us,” he whispers in my ear.
From the east came the men with faces and hands the color of snow. The men were ugly. Hair covered their faces and bodies, and when Drinks Water saw them he thought of the hairy water monsters w ho drew swimmers into their mouths by making waves. He worshipped the large boulder for strength. They came riding Shoon-ka wah-kon, fearful, mysterious dogs — wonderful dogs, fast as the wind. Drinks Water offered a pipe to these men and they let him touch the beautiful clogs. Trust us, they said to Drinks Water and they passed the pipe back and forth.