Range of Light (5 page)

“Hey, look, up there.”

Peering, I saw nothing.

“Marmot,” whispered Kath. “See, a yellow marmot, that groundhog-looking animal, ducking in and out? See her between the rocks?”

“Yes.” I nodded, although I saw nothing. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would open my eyes.

Chapter Five

Kath

Monday Evening / Tuolumne Meadows

SITTING WITH ADELE
on
the boulders by Miller Cascade, I felt we'd always been friends. So easy now, to talk and laugh together. Still the same people, just scuffed and polished here and there. Adele seemed softer. More assured. I suppose I'd developed something resembling a sense of humor. Really, this was completely natural, like we'd seen each other every week during the last twenty years. Also eerie, like those decades hadn't happened. Over the next week I'd be asked to explain my life, my failures, my accidental but not yet fatal course.

“How was the phone call? Are Lou and the boys doing OK?”

Adele's face washed with pleasure, suspicion. Honest, I
was
interested. Saying this would be begging the question.

“Fine, fine. Watching TV together in the backyard. It's one of those sweltering Cambridge nights. Humidity is something I don't miss about the East.”

I was curious about what she did miss and if she was lonely for them already and whether she found me so boring she might cut the trip short.

“But they all seem to be coping splendidly, eating ice cream and watching
Star Trek
on cable. Lou is spoiling them while I'm away—maybe to make me feel guilty. It's not going to work: I deserve this holiday. I need it.”

That was better. “Tell me about the boys.”

Adele grinned and, as if her smile were too heavy for her face, she bent her head back on that long, pale neck. “Totally different. Simon's ten. A sweet, relaxed kid. Bright as his dad, and with a temperament from some other universe, at least some other family: gentle, noncompetitive, confident.”

“And Taylor?”

“Taylor.” She paused, thinking. “Taylor is a year younger. Assertive, nervous and also very smart. Carrying neuroses from both the Wards and the Joneses. A complicated, fascinating boy, but too burdened for his age.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“What do you mean?” She was actually puzzled.

“You were a pretty burdened youth,” I tried cautiously.

“Me? You mean Sari. I was the lucky one.”

We were going too fast. I wasn't ready for painful memories of Adele's sister, Sari. For any painful memories. Why had I said anything? Because I was jealous of Adele's kids. Not so much jealous of her for having kids but jealous of them for having her. How could I get out of this? I didn't have to.

She saw warning lights and asked, “How are your parents, Kath? I often think about your mom. She was … I mean, probably she still is … so warm, loving. Your place was such a refuge after my life in the house of a thousand swords.”

I shrugged. It was coming back now, how Adele had never understood my family, had always idealized them as simple people with good hearts. Well, this wasn't the time for analyzing Peterson pathology. “OK, I guess. But Dad's developing a sort of senility, and that's hard. Harder on her than him.” I kept my voice even. Later, maybe, I would tell her about Mom's bruises.

“I'm sorry” Adele looked at me with those huge brown eyes. “For all my troubles with Father, at least his mind is intact. How tough for you!”

I nodded. “Maybe we can talk about it sometime later this week. When we're not so tired.” Shivering, I wanted my sweater. Night had dropped abruptly. “Maybe we should get some rest?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” She gulped the last of her wine.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to rush you.”

“Lou says hi.” She stood with the empty glass.

“Oh, right, good. ‘Hi' back—next time you talk to him.” What else could I say about this man I had despised forever? Who had despised me. Adele had always been skillful at social niceties. So much more mature, a better, kinder person altogether.

As we passed the meadows, I imagined how they'd look in winter. Quiet December with sun glinting off the ice. Long, dark tree branches scoring shadows across the white blanket. Every pawprint visible in snow. This summer evening, the meadow simmered with the scavenging, courting music of nocturnal critters. Baffin had loved the meadows. I wanted to talk about my cat, but even thinking about her choked me up. No, I wasn't ready.

Despite the dim light tonight, I spotted deer, jackrabbit and hawk. Adele saw a ground squirrel. We both smelled the skunk.

Adele entered the tent first.
I stayed outside, surrounded by aromas of dying trees and camp dinners, listening for night sounds, watching the sky in hopes—dashed—of shooting stars, waiting, waiting for the courage to crawl back into the tent with an all-too-familiar person. The fear was ridiculous. We were grown women, with separate lives. Adele beamed the lantern, and the tent became a lavender firefly poised in the cool mountain darkness.

She didn't look up as I entered. I saw she was reading
Lantern Slides
by Edna O'Brien, and I felt excluded, but also relieved because I was surprisingly shy about undressing. Finally in my sleeping bag, I got fixated on Edna crashing our party.

“I hope Nancy's OK,” I said. “Pretty scared, I guess.”

“Sure.” Adele set aside the book. “I'm sure she's terrified. Still, she has a lot of confidence in that surgeon. And the girls are there.”

“All four of them?”

“Yes, Clare flew in from Panama.”

“I bet Nancy was—is—a great mother. Maybe also a little overwhelming.”

“What do you mean?” Adele's voice stung back.

“I mean she doesn't let go. You know the way she stayed in touch with us all these years.”

“I think that was nice.”

“Oh, I do, too.” I couldn't help but consider that I would be enjoying a restoring, solitary mountain retreat if Nancy had been less persistent. “I admire it. I don't know. I just don't see where she found the time—the energy—to phone, write postcards and send those annual Christmas letters. In comparison, I'm a complete hermit.”

Adele laughed, a deep, lying down, gurgling laugh. “You are a recluse.”

That felt all right. It was true.

“But don't you see, Nancy enjoyed it. Remember how her family always had those big New Year's parties.”

“I remember Mr. Decker, fetal position under the piano, purring like a cat.” I grimaced at the memory of silly Mr. Decker, who at the time seemed a happy contrast to our overserious fathers.

“And to Nancy, our friendship meant a lot.”

I felt the wind exit my lungs. “Are you saying”—I was on edge—“that it didn't mean a lot to me?”

“No,” Adele responded quietly. “No, I don't think I'm saying that.”

I lay there in silence, aware of Adele's soft breathing, of the scents of her herbal shampoo and sandalwood soap, my eyes closed.

“I'm just saying that Nancy was intent on celebrating friendship—through letters, at the reunion, with this trip. In contrast to family events, like weddings and anniversaries, there aren't many rituals for friendship.”

My lids opened. “Yeah, family always comes before friendship.”

“So do lovers. I mean, friendships are women-women things, or between men. They lack the commodification of sex appeal.” Adele backtracked nervously. “Of course there are nonromantic friendships between men and women and romantic single-sex relationships, if you know what I mean …”

“I know what you mean.”

“So friendship is a kind of accessory to life.” She stared at the nylon ceiling.

“The detachable sidecar,” I said, approaching danger.

“Yes.” Abruptly, she diverted us. “And Nancy knew—she always had a talent for friendship—that self could be constructed beyond family.”

From the next campsite: the sound of our neighbor unzipping his compact tent. I felt a twinge of envy about his uncomplicated, independent camping trip.

“No, not without a sense of family,” Adele continued. “I suppose her father's incest, well, shaped her irrevocably.”

“So friends were a safe port.”

“More like a raft. Because she went on to create her
own
family. And those girls, they really have become the center of her life.”

“Hope it's a long one.”

“Yes.” She was subdued, tired.

We fell silent. Time passed. Tentatively Adele whispered, “Shall I turn out the light?”

“Sure.” But once the lantern was off, I needed to resume. “I used to be so scared I would die in my sleep, you know”—why was I rattling on like this?—“that I would say to Mom, ‘Good-night-see-you-in-the-morning-I-love-you.' ”

“That's sweet.” Her faint voice was distracted.

“No,” I felt compelled to explain. “It was a superstition. If I said it, I wouldn't die.”

“That was a lot healthier than Sari. When we shared the upstairs bedroom on Wharton Street, she used to recite that twisted prayer, ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.' ” She sniffed.

“Yes.” My voice was muted. Sari was still one of the many hard topics ahead.

“Well”—she steadied her words—“good night.”

“Good night.”

She added, “See-you-in-the-morning.”

I could smell the earth beneath us. It had been a long day. Time to sleep. But I was speeding on an overdose of altitude and anxiety. The mountains were a dangerous place, where the long, clear vistas create an illusion that you could see
life
clearly. Any minute now, I would step over a precipice.

Adele's breaths grew even. Poor woman must have been wiped out. What a life she had racing all over the country. Lecturing. Teaching. Writing books. Raising two sons. Adele was so much more grown up than I. Sophisticated. Accomplished. Her breathing sounded more content now. What did I have to contribute by way of conversational topics? The condoms preferred by North Oakland teenagers? The challenges of providing pregnancy counseling to teens in public schools? The state's lousy administration of soft money funds and how politicians had manipulated the agency for electoral ends? My own choice right now between taking another quicksand job and going back to school?

Ridiculous to even think about spending that kind of money for tuition with my parents the way they were. No point getting a degree at a time of wholesale layoffs. Going back to school had more to do with some ancient vanity than with job prospects. Still, I needed to prove that I was different from the rest of the Petersons, that I had belonged in that advanced high school class.

Our campground was quiet, except for the occasional roar from the highway or the swish of an anonymous small animal inspecting pots and lanterns. Or an intermittent hoot. Baffin had hated owls. How could anyone find them cute? Maybe the brilliant eyes distracted people from the menacing claws and beaks. I'd always been petrified by their patient vigils, by the eerie, soundless swiveling of their heads.

Here I was, Kath Peterson, age forty-four, continuing to worry whether I had been put in the right high school track. Here I was, lying in a tent with an old friend who had traveled thousands of miles to a new life, had suffered through a major family tragedy, had a national—who knew? international—reputation. This trip had to be one of the silliest things I had ever done. Why had I gone to that idiotic reunion?

In fact, I wouldn't have considered it—I had already thrown out the sappy invitation—if Michael and Stephen hadn't ambushed me at the Pete Seeger concert. I knew they had always wanted to go to the Senior Ball. (“A gala named for fags,” Michael had insisted way back then, even before Stonewall. I wondered who I'd been protecting in high school by not telling Adele that Michael was gay.) And this reunion would sort of make up for missing the festivities years ago. Still, they needed support—at least one friend who would stay on the dance floor with them. And they couldn't take a chance waiting for the thirtieth reunion, when people might be more liberated. Who knew what would happen to two HIV-positive queers in five years?

It took good old Nancy to drag Adele on the dance floor, where, after hugs and nervous kisses all around, we bopped to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” until my ankles ached. Then Nancy commandeered a guitar for Paula, and half the class of 1965—Vietnam vets, Berkeley radicals, gay fathers, corporate executives—were moaning after Charlie on the MTA. “ … his fate is still unlearned. Poor Charlie, he may ride forever …” Of course, vital Adele sang the loudest, the longest.

My back settled into the sleeping bag, and my sleeping bag settled into the uneven earthen floor. We were trying to sleep beside one another. (Above ground. Before the funerals. With so much left to say.) Physical senses being safer than emotions, I concentrated on the pine needles scrunching beneath the tent. Maybe one reason Adele's presence unsettled me was that I would now have
this
memory to replace the other. I was happy enough with the past, with the way I had shaped and shaded it over the years. Maybe I resented Adele for being real. I didn't want to know how
she
remembered those years. I wanted them all to myself.

Gently now, I lifted the small window flap. Yes, I thought if we pitched the tent at this angle, I would catch a glimpse of tonight's moon. There—a lucent slice of melon. Mid-August was the season of shooting stars. Searching my swath of sky, I was disappointed to find everything holding firmly. Adele's breathing continued slow—in … out, in … out—and steady. My arm grew tired of holding the flap. Soon the rest of my body would surrender. Soon.

Chapter Six

Adele

Sunday, the day before / Cambridge

I WOKE FROM THE
HALF-LIGHT
. The anxiety. The snoring. Sometimes Lou's attitude about snoring was comical: he simply refused to believe he did it and insisted I was dreaming or projecting. Well, snoring could be soothing, in and out, in and out, like the rhythms of a ceiling fan. I could get used to it. Just as I always worried those ceiling fans would fly off and decapitate me, I imagined Lou's snoring into spluttering coughing fits. Actually, I was lucky to have this smart, sensitive man snoring beside me. Noise was a small price. Well, the schedule was too jammed this morning for the semiotics of nasal expression. Quietly, I slipped out of bed. No, I hadn't disturbed him. In and out. In and out.

I pulled on some underpants, then threw a long T-shirt over my relatively fit (of course I'd be able to keep up with Kath) body and tiptoed into the study to sort out papers for the trip. One week in the High Sierra and one week at Stanford. My carpool buddy Clara said this dichotomy was hilarious, very Western. I acknowledged the looniness of swinging from the rugged backcountry to Palo Alto's manicured groves, a huge emotional and physical shift. But I had a whole day between events. Time now for a shower and a thorough rereading of my paper. Thank God I had managed to avoid adding a visit with Father to this volatile mix.

On the way to school last week, Clara praised my adventuresomeness with dubious enthusiasm. “Mountain climbing! Backpacking!” she declared as if I were hitting the Oregon Trail solo in a covered wagon.

Carefully, I placed my conference paper in a new green file folder. This way I wouldn't fret about not having it. I could always look in my briefcase and see that it was there. What a first-class neurotic I was. Next to the file I slipped a copy of my new book, which, I had learned, was always worth carrying. A conference program. The letter from the dean at Berkeley. Why was I taking
that
?
To memorize on the plane? To keep Lou from finding it? Of course Lou didn't rifle through my desk. I had an overly dramatized superstition about the letter. Click. Click. Click: our automatic coffee machine seduced me into the kitchen with the sharp, sullen aroma of fresh mocha java. As the gleaming brown drug filled the glass dispenser, I thought about what a virgin I had been in that first year of grad school. I didn't smoke pot, didn't drink coffee. Now I poured myself a mug and returned to the study.

As I ingested the caffeine, my attention was drawn as it was almost every morning to the old postcard of Half Dome at sunrise. I had carried this sentimental relic from office to office over the years. The article was almost finished, really, but I had promised myself one last edit on screen before I printed it out. This was the eighth draft; it should be ready. Lou would laugh if he knew I were still working on it. He had always been able to complete projects in two or three drafts. Startled by a rap on the glass door to my study, I turned to find Taylor.

He was a short, handsome boy whose fierce determination reminded me, at times, of Father. Since the kid had spent hardly any time with his grandpa, I was afraid that genes account for a lot more in human development than I had reckoned on. Something else I hadn't anticipated was how my love for the boys would expand with each phase of their lives. When Taylor was an infant, I thought he was perfect. And yet, as the months and years allowed him originality, volition, culpability, my heart ached more deeply for him. People didn't think enough about children as individuals. Adults spent too much time worrying about kids' needs and griping about the impositions they created and not enough time rejoicing about their very individual contributions. The aggrieved expression on Taylor's face forced me back to the present.

“You're up early.” I smiled, holding open my arms, encouraging him to relax.

Taylor nestled his head into my shoulder and my chest expanded with pleasure.

“Yeah, we have the kayak race today, Mom. And I know Simon is going to dawdle.”

“Dawdle?” Where had he picked that up? A word his grandpa used often.

He moved away and I had to restrain myself from pulling him back.

“So will you get on his case? Will you make him hurry?”

I glanced out at the Bavarian clock on the living room mantel. It wasn't even 6:00 A.M. The clock was Lou's most romantic acquisition, something he had picked up in Munich during our junior year abroad—to put on our mantel when we settled down. My breath had been taken away by the expense of it, but Lou had insisted it was a sound investment. Never once during the last twenty-three years had it needed repair.

“Taylor, your van doesn't leave for an hour!” I held out my hand, but he had turned skittish, wary of contact. Gently I added, “Let your brother sleep in. If he's not up in half an hour, you can go wake him.”

He stood there looking at me through Sari's gray eyes.

“But … OK.” Taylor pouted with superb nine-year-old self-righteousness. “As long as you promise—thirty minutes.”

“I promise. Sweetie, I promise.”

In fact, we did have to wake up Simon, but he was dressed and ready at five minutes to seven, which was more than you could have said for his father, who still slept soundly, yes, snoring.

“We should get the old bear on tape.” Taylor rolled his eyes.

I laughed, appalled and delighted by his irreverence. “It's OK, I'll take you.”

I scribbled a note to Lou and set it on the dining room table. “All aboard.”

After making sure
they were
safely on the Camp Wild­river van, I stopped off at a copy center in Cambridge, bought a postcard for Father, and settled down for a cappuccino at Nick's. Actually there was time between faxing the article and getting my hair cut to go back home. But it would be a trek, and Lou liked having the place to himself occasionally. The postcard revealed the Charles River in summer splendor, a couple reading on the banks. “All well here,” I wrote. “Working hard on summer projects. We go off to Maine in three weeks. Hope your back is better. Love, A.” I would mail it today. Send another when I returned from my trip, and he would never know I had been in California. I used to feel terrible about such behavior, but, as Lou said, people needed survival strategies. Lou had been such a psychological refuge over the years—not just a base of security but a voice of sanity, reassuring me that, yes, my family was a bit gothic and yes, geographical distance was healthy. A stronger person wouldn't have needed such absolution.

Cambridge was at its most vibrant in the morning with people rushing between bookstores and copy shops. Even on Sunday there was a refreshing hum. Sure, I missed the old Sundays when everything was closed and Lou and I would walk along the river or drive up the coast. But now I didn't know how I would get everything accomplished if shops were closed on this day of rest. My capitalist sabbath was a tune-up day, gearing me for the week ahead. I kept telling myself to cut something out. For instance, Lou thought I spent too much time volunteering at the shelter, but then he did his own political work for Greenpeace. Probably I needed to concentrate better. And if living in Cambridge was an invitation to frenzy, it was better than being marooned in the suburbs of Wellesley. I did some of my most inspired thinking at Nick's Coffee Shop, scribbling in a notebook. Was it odd that I was addicted to caffeine while Mother and Sari had craved downers?

Occasionally at Nick's in the summer, I pretended to be sitting in Berkeley or North Beach. People walked by slowly in the heat. They dressed in a way that was
almost
indistinguishable from Californians. Not quite so many sandals. But for most of the year, I felt the geocultural differences keenly. In Massachusetts, one was always conscious of who had arrived first. In this stratified social system, I was still an outsider after a quarter century. Among Californians, most white families, at least, were relatively new. Everyone had reached the edge. People dwelled in the present and the future. My schizophrenia wasn't helped by the fact that people on each coast harbored mutual antagonisms. To Bostonians, Californians were New Age narcissists. To Californians, Massachusetts people were thin, rigid, bloodless snobs. To compensate for the misery of frozen weather and crumbling buildings, Easterners shrugged off California as a failed paradise crowded with brain-dead people who shoot each other on the freeways.

Despite the caffeine and the early morning start, I was almost late for my hair appointment.

“Usual color and cut?” Barbara inquired in that hectic, upbeat voice. During the last ten years I had come to trust Barbara to shape and paint my hair. In fact, I had no clue what color it actually was—Winter Black, Jet Evening, something like that.

“Going on a trip?” Her voice, rich with the busy texture of Dorchester.

“Yes. To California.”

“Vacation or one of those conferences?”

“Both,” I said, leaning back into the basin. I flashed on Mary, Queen of Scots, laying her neck on the guillotine: the perfect simile for spending a week alone with Kath.

“Where's the vacation? Lying on a beach somewhere?”

“No.” My shoulders tightened. “A week hiking in the High Sierra.”

“Taking the kids?”

“No, just a friend and I. An old girlfriend.” I sat up stiffly as she toweled my hair.

“Sounds like a good break.”

I nodded with tentative satisfaction.

“You must know her pretty well to want to spend a week in the mountains together.”

“Well, we're old friends. Since fifth grade. That's thirty-five years.”

“Oh, you'll be fine. People don't change that much. I have a friend from the eighth grade, and we still hang out together. Same dynamics. She's the bossy one. I'm the rascal. You'll be fine.”

“Yes,” I murmured distractedly as Barbara teased my roots with a little green brush. Was she getting it dark enough this time? So hard to tell when wet. I closed my eyes. Kath would never consider coloring her hair. Of course gray didn't really show in blond hair. Still, I would die if Kath knew I had spent the day before our trip in a beauty salon. Barbara could be very wrong about us getting along; there were so many differences in our lives now. Occasionally I imagined Kath reading one of my articles. But where would she come across
Representations
or
Genders
or
Signs?
I had once thought I'd dedicate my first book to Kath—but that would have broken Mom's heart. And the next one had to be dedicated “to Lou and the boys without whom …” Besides, what would Kath make of a gendered reading of fifties Western films? Was Kath a feminist? Of course, she was the first feminist I had ever met—at age ten.

“There you go. All set for the dryer,” Barbara declared.

“Looks as if I've been through a mudslide.” I wondered at my squeamishness today.

“Preview of your trip!” Barbara laughed heartily.

Adjusting myself under the dryer, I picked up a copy of
People
magazine. I read it in the compulsive way I ate potato chips and then felt vaguely nauseated afterward. But there was something about the rag—it was as if the gossip held out promise and admonition about how to live and not live one's own life: Princess Di was binging again; Garth Brooks was having throat problems.

From the outside, from the point of view of many people, I had an enviable life. Look at this story about an Ozarks woman with nine kids who was mayor of her town and also held down a job as a telephone operator. I was very lucky—I had worked hard and used my advantages as best I could, but I
had
those advantages, and compared to this woman in Arkansas, my life was vanilla pudding. I recited the reassuring litany to myself: Finished grad school in five years. Married. Did a year of adjunct teaching. Landed a job at Wellesley. Published a book. Got tenure. Had two healthy children. I was what I would have considered a wild success story twenty years ago. Clara praised me for keeping my ego in check. But my children, my partner, were gifts of fate. And I knew that my career was a fluke, that I had stumbled on my aptitude as I moved along—the inadvertent academic. Once, I had thought I might get a master's degree and marry a bright, handsome man, settle down in the Bay Area and exchange child-rearing stories with Kath.

Yes, that had been the plan, almost a pact.

How did I get here—a forty-four year old college professor, mother, wife, writer. Or mother, wife, writer, professor. What was the order? The priority? This is how—a combination of activated desire and restrained imagination.

Driving home,
I gobbled a
slice of pepperoni pizza—not the healthiest lunch, but it was quick and would save me from creating an elaborate meal with Lou. I couldn't believe that some of my colleagues cooked for their families every night. Lou had always been great about that. He was introducing his sons to the kitchen already. Simon could make a mean omelette, and Taylor's gingerbread was terrific. There—he wasn't a bad mate at all. I was the rotten parent for, unnaturally, selfishly, I sometimes ached to be free of the guys and I would go up to the Maine cabin a week ahead of the family to write or sketch. Lou was good about these respites, but the boys complained they missed me. I finished the pizza and switched on the radio, realizing that I hadn't heard news today. Perhaps I could bring my Walkman to the mountains. No, Kath would not approve.

Of course I hadn't got here—hadn't claimed this relatively balanced life—without some sacrifices and compromises; it wasn't all serendipity. I still felt pangs about turning down grad school at Berkeley. But Lou really needed to be at Yale for divinity school. And Rutgers had a perfectly good art history program. What else could I have done? I didn't want to be in California, that was part of the truth. As much as I missed the West, I didn't want to be that close to my parents. So choosing Rutgers hadn't been sheer accommodation.