Impossible Vacation Read online

  Anyway, one day, somebody came to me and said, “You boys are going to have to go away to different places.” I remember that I was sitting alone on a chair on the front porch because it was real hot and you could hear the cicadas (which we called “heat bugs” then). You couldn’t see the heat bugs and yet they were very loud. I was sitting there, dressed only in my blue shorts with white stripes on the side. I was just sitting there picking honeysuckle blossoms from the great honeysuckle vine that covered the whole front of the porch. I was snipping the base of each blossom with my thumbnail and pulling the little stem to try to fill up my father’s one-ounce shot glass with honey, one drop at a time, until perhaps hours or days later I’d have enough honey for one little sip. I wasn’t fighting with Cole or anything. I wasn’t even trying to jump out the window. I don’t remember where Cole and Topher were, but I do remember that someone came up behind me and said, “You boys are going to have to be separated for the rest of the summer because your Mom can’t stand it anymore.”

  Cole went down the road to stay with Gramma Benton. I was to go stay with Gramma North in Sakonnet, where she was living for the summer with a friend. Topher got to stay at home with Mom and Dad. Mom drove me as far as Mount Hope Bridge. And then to save on the two-dollar toll we walked across together to meet Gramma North and her friend Anne. I’d never walked over that bridge before or even dreamed I ever would. We’d driven over it many times on our way to Windmill Hill and the ocean, but no one I knew had ever walked over it. It was very exciting and frightening. About halfway over we heard the voices of men talking underneath and it turned out that they were bridge painters suspended on little swings, painting the bridge just under us. Mom must have been in an all-right mood, because she was real chatty and made joking conversation with them and they whistled and called back and told us to have a good day. The view from that bridge made me dizzy, and the boats looked like toys far below. We met Gram North and her friend Anne on the other side; then Mom walked back across the bridge alone.

  I spent the rest of the summer with Gram and Anne and I didn’t like it that much. I didn’t like being all alone with myself and I didn’t like being told what to do by Gram, and most of all, I didn’t like being told what to do by her friend Anne, who was almost a complete stranger to me.

  Even going to the ocean with them didn’t help. I missed Mom and Mom’s eyes on me. I would lie on the warm sand with my eyes closed, dreaming of my trip to Bali and, most important, my return from Bali and how Mom would be there at the gate to greet me.

  Then when I would go into the ocean I would just lie there at the edge like a limp drowned boy and let the waves wash me in and out. My body would roll into the surf and wash back up again just like a piece of driftwood. This would upset Gram and Anne so much that they would come and scold me. “Don’t do that, Brewster,” they’d say. “Do not do that. We don’t like it. It frightens us,” they’d cry, each waving a finger at me.

  The next thing that I remember was that it was September and I was back home and Mom was not there because she had gone away to a Christian Science rest home. After that, when she had gotten all rested up, she went to spend some time at Gram and Gramp Benton’s down the road from our house. I think she stayed in bed there a lot. When I came to visit her she was in bed in the guest bedroom in the middle of the day. I thought it was strange that Mom would be in bed in the middle of the day when she didn’t even have a cold or a fever or anything like that. She just needed a lot of rest, someone kept saying, and please be quiet, don’t raise your voice. “Your mother got very overtired and she needs a lot of rest to get well.”

  It was sometime between October and Thanksgiving when Mom came home again, and that was the time she had something real big and important happen to her. She had what she called “a healing.” She all of a sudden got healed by a vision of Christ coming down into the living room on a shaft of late-morning sunlight. We were all away at school and Dad was at work. I don’t know where Gramma North was, but Mom told me that she was lying on the couch reading from Science and Health and then she got all of a sudden very calm and very clear, like the clear calm before a storm, she said. But the storm didn’t follow. Christ came instead. Christ came down a shaft of sunlight almost like he’d slid in on one of those bright, rolling autumn clouds off of Narragansett Bay. He came in on a shaft of light and touched Mom’s feet and touched the palms of her hands, and she was instantaneously healed and filled with joy.

  She got so very, very high, she said, like the time she once told me about watching Arturo Toscanini direct the New York Philharmonic in Providence. She said they were playing Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony and she just floated right up out of her body. She floated right up to the ceiling like a ghost of herself looking back down at it all, and saw herself watching the Philharmonic play. So Jesus came and touched Mom with all of his electric love and left, never to return again.

  Mom told me this story. And she told me that right after she was healed she made the mistake of telling Dad about it. It was a mistake to tell him because he doubted it in such a big way that she was poisoned by his doubt and fell back into a nervous collapse, and she had to fight real hard to know the truth again and remember how Christ had touched her. She had to fight hard to keep things to herself, to keep her newfound secrets from Dad.

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER Dad decided that one way to be sure Mom stayed rested and relaxed was to rent a little beach bungalow down in Jerusalem, which was a small fishing village just across from Galilee on the Rhode Island shore. This made Mom very happy. She was back to her old lively self again, that good old “7UP Kid.” Because Mom never drank anything stronger than 7UP at the parties Dad and she went to, people would often refer to her as “The 7UP Kid.” And often she’d end up doing cartwheels and standing on her head, and many people who didn’t know she was an abstainer would say, “Hey, wow! What has Kit been drinking?”

  And once again she was all full of spirit and pep and raring to go. She couldn’t wait for summer to come. Dad had told Mom that the house on the beach had a sun deck on the roof, and Mom was so excited about that she used to pretend that she was going up to the sun deck when she would go up the back stairs of our house. “Okay, guys,” she’d yell, “just going up to the deck to get a little sun.”

  Dad had rented a sweet little boxlike house right on the beach. In fact, when big storms came the waves would wash under it. We heard that it had even been picked up and turned around by the sea during a hurricane. It had two little bedrooms, just large enough for a bureau and a set of bunk beds. Then there was a small living room, where Mom and Dad slept on a roll-away bed. Also there was a tiny kitchen. I slept in one room on the top bunk and Topher slept under me. Coleman and Gramma North slept in the other bunk room. It didn’t matter how small the beach house was because we had the whole beach just outside. Also, the roof was flat and it did have a sun deck. I wondered why anyone would want to lie on the roof when they had the whole beach to lie on. But Mom would go up there anyway and read her Christian Science Monitor. She loved to lie in the sun.

  My brothers and I would spend most of the day in the water bobbing like corks, riding the waves until our skin was shriveled. We lived like fish in the sea. When Dad came home from work we’d all go swimming again with him at sundown. We had no radio or TV. We only had the sound of the sea making us all happy and well again. On rainy days we’d go into Wakefield, or race empty coffee cans on the neighbor’s boardwalk. We had three fantastic summers in a row at that little house. Those were the summers when I laughed a lot for the last time.

  AFTER THE YEARS of summering in Jerusalem we moved from inland Barrington to water’s edge in West Barrington. We moved to a house right on the edge of Narragansett Bay. Then because we were right on the water there was no reason to travel to the seaside. We just stayed home on the bay, that fantastic ever-changing bay. We could see great freighters coming and going from all over the world—from Bali, maybe—coming to unload at the do
cks of Providence. We could see the lighthouse in the distance at the end of Nayatt Point, and far beyond the lighthouse on a clear day we could see Patience and Prudence islands. For the first time in our lives we were living with a view, an ever-changing view that stunned and mesmerized. On a clear winter night we could see the sparkling lights of Mount Hope Bridge twenty miles away blending with the stars twenty million light-years away. The sunsets were enough to make a strong man weep. There was hardly a need to go out of the house or out of the yard; all you had to do was give yourself to that view and your head would empty out and an odd peace would come, a peace and joy that were never there before among the cozy lawns and hedges of inland Barrington.

  When I was in college I would come home on weekends just for the view. On vacations I would come home alone and spend much of the day sitting in Dad’s easy chair by the bay window, slowly sipping beers to Bach on the hi-fi, just sipping beers and watching the freighters coming and going; dreaming of shipping out on one, watching the light change, watching the sun rise and set over the bay.

  But there were times when I thought that the view was almost too much for Mom, perhaps because she didn’t wash that raw beauty down with drink the way Dad and I did. Mom used to stamp her feet. I remember the way she would try to stamp out beauty as she watched the sunset from the sea wall. She’d stamp her saddle shoes and moan as she did her anxious beauty walk at the edge of Narragansett Bay, sometimes singing the song that went:

  Down on Narragansett Bay

  Where we watched the gulls at play

  It was on that Jamestown strand

  That I won her hand

  Down on Narragansett—

  Oh, you lovin’ ’gansett—

  Down on Narragansett Bay …

  Mom would just stamp her brown-and-white saddle shoes at the sunset, and wring her hands, and almost wet her pants, she said. It was as if she couldn’t stand being separate from it all, couldn’t stand not being a part of it no matter how much she tried.

  On those weekends, I fell into being on that bay with Mom and I couldn’t leave. I wanted to get to Land’s End: Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the whole of the United States ended in a sort of clenched fist—the terminus of the flexed arm of the mighty Cape Cod. But I never went.

  Mom lived for Narragansett Bay and the walks along its shore. She would have loved to walk on the water if she could; and in fact she did once, one winter when great winds came off the bay and froze our plumbing and brought a great white snowy owl down from the far north to roost. She went out and walked on the frozen bay.

  That summer, though, that last summer on the bay, Mom and I would sit together by the water’s edge and empty out. In the distance we could hear Topher practicing his Chopin in the dark basement below. Topher had become obsessed with the piano and would practice most of the day, surfacing occasionally only for a quick dip in the bay. At noon Mom would make him a tuna sandwich and bring it down to him to keep him going. If she didn’t feed him he’d forget to eat. I was a little jealous that he could be so disciplined and obsessed. He lived through that piano and Mom encouraged him to keep at it.

  So, with Chopin in the distance Mom and I watched a sea gull fly over and drop a quahog on the sea wall; the quahog smashed and the bird dove in for its sweet sea meat. Another sea gull took all afternoon to swallow an eel. The gull just sat there, stunned by the presence of the live, protesting prey in its throat; the eel’s tail flipping out of its open mouth, as though the bird were choking rather than eating. And then the helpless eel slowly slipped down to curl up and drown in that belly of digestive juice. We watched it all together, Mom and I, our eyes like one common eye or sometimes even with Dad’s binoculars, which were like the eyes he had left at home while he went off to work.

  We also saw a tan boy come each day with his inflated inner tube and ride out in the bay all alone, kicking and splashing until his body glistened like dark brown gravy. Maybe he was me at a younger age, I thought as I watched him through Dad’s binoculars, which made him look as though he were emerging from the head of the gull that was trying to swallow the eel.

  Mom and I would swim together before lunch and after lunch. That’s what we’d do whenever silence sometimes felt like death and the gull swallowing the eel became too gross, or the boy in the inner tube felt like he had to be touched to be real.

  That summer the bay was clear, with no algae. We could see all the way down to the bottom as we swam, and Mom and I would swim together. If I couldn’t see everywhere, in all directions at once, which was of course impossible, I would go into a sort of panic. She was a good, relaxed swimmer, as if she belonged to the bay. Mom never noticed my panic. She swam, strong and fearless, ahead of me.

  Then we’d dry off in the sun and eat lunch together side by side. Mom always had something simple for lunch, like a glass of milk and a tuna fish sandwich or, for variety, peanut butter and jelly, or even sometimes peanut butter and marshmallow or cream cheese and jelly on white Pepperidge Farm bread. I was more baroque. I needed to have what I thought was the best, perhaps because it was the most prized. I wanted Dad’s meat. I wanted steak for lunch. Dad had a whole bunch of frozen steaks wrapped in white freezer paper in the basement freezer, and I’d go fetch a small, rock-hard one at night just before bed. I’d sneak down after Mom and Dad went to bed and I’d take a small steak out and I’d put it in a glass Pyrex dish under the couch in the basement den. By lunchtime the next day, the meat would be perfectly thawed and lying there in its cool red pool of blood. Mom always called the blood “juice,” but I’d always say, “No, it’s blood, Mom, it’s not juice. It’s blood! It’s the blood of an animal!” Our next-door neighbor was a vegetarian and no one understood that. I couldn’t even think of him as a person, only as a vegetarian, and at the time I thought he must be the only vegetarian in the Western world.

  So I would cook red meat at noon in July and eat it in the sun at the red card table next to Mom, who ate her simple sandwiches with gusto and washed them down with milk. Gulp, gulp, gulp—I could hear her swallow and see her throat expand and contract like that of the gull swallowing the eel. And I felt like Henry VIII eating Dad’s meat. I was feeding myself rare meat and I was drinking red wine and I could feel my whole body blowing up like a big sotblob. I imagined myself to be the sea gull that swallowed the eel that swallowed the fish that swallowed the crab that ate the clam that lived in the bay that Mom and I swam in.

  And after eating I’d lie there in my chair and digest it like the sea gull, then maybe doze for a bit in the sun. Or, just to get away from Mom, I’d go upstairs to my bedroom, where I’d peel off my wet Speedo swimsuit and let my damp eel loose and watch it grow out of my scrotum, which rolled and rippled like the patterns of a beach at low tide. The sun through the window warmed my balls. I’d bring myself off quickly, and fall into the welcome relief of a body spent, without any apparent complication or ramification, only the uneasy thought of Mom still stretched out and waiting for me there below my window by the bay in that sea yard.

  But I really wanted to fly the nest; a big part of me wanted to get out of there. I wanted so to go to Bali, or at least to Provincetown, where I couldn’t go any farther and I would know where and why to stop because it was all ocean from there on out. I wanted to go to Provincetown to sow my wild oats, whatever that meant. I knew that “wild oats” was just an expression, but still it had some secret meaning to me then—I don’t know, to get in trouble, maybe even fall in love, whatever that was. I needed to get away from Mom. It was too sticky and warm to be right.

  So in the morning I’d load up Mom’s big tin-bread-box Ford wagon with all the goodies I felt I needed to survive on the beach in Provincetown. I was just going to go down there and try to learn how to hang out—you know, just be. It was in 1963, and people all around were starting to learn how to do that, to just hang out and just be in the moment. I’d load up Mom’s car with all the provisions: my L. L. Bean sleeping bag, Mom’s Metrecal and Instan
t Breakfast, and Dad’s rock-hard frozen meat, which I’d put on ice in the cooler. I’d say goodbye to Mom and head out for Provincetown. A few blocks from home I’d end up turning around and heading back, unloading the car, and swimming and eating lunch with Mom on the lawn. One last swim, one last lunch. Then the next day I’d load up the car again with my sleeping bag, Mom’s Metrecal and Instant Breakfast, and Dad’s frozen meat and say goodbye to Mom and drive a few miles farther this time and then just end up turning around and coming back. Mom never asked me why I kept coming back. We’d just swim and eat lunch together and sit there on the edge of Narragansett Bay. I never made it to Provincetown that summer.

  BUT THEN, as always, things began to change. The factory where Dad worked in Providence got too old; that’s what they said, anyway—they wanted to update it. They wanted to build a new one; they wanted to keep up with modern times. So they decided to relocate inland, to the countryside across the bay. Mom and Dad began to talk a lot about this relocation problem.

  I can remember Dad was quite upset, because this relocation meant a big commute for him. As the sea gull flew, it would have been a short gliding trip, but a car would have to go all the way up through Providence and around the other side of the bay and then inland as well. Inland—that was the worst thought.

  By then Mom had gotten deeper and deeper into Christian Science and the full-blown love of Christ. She wanted to do the Christian thing and move inland to be closer to Dad’s new place of work, she really wanted to do the Christian thing and not be selfish, even though somewhere in her she knew that to leave the bay and move inland would be something like death. And much as she believed in heaven, I don’t think she was ready to die yet, because being on that bay was sort of a heaven on earth for her.