We Are Water. Wally Lamb
seems to lie in wait and, whenever she hears my footsteps, pops open her door and wants me to talk or fix something for her. The couch in my apartment has a peculiar, not-quite-identifiable odor to it. And worst of all, the place is just too goddamned small. When I sit on the wobbly toilet seat, I can make my knees touch the opposite wall. Whatever room I’m in, I can reach up and palm the ceiling. The first night I was there, I lay awake in the dark and could almost swear the bedroom walls were closing in on me. It had been a stupid move on my part. Simplify, simplify, simplify? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
By the third night, I decided that if I was going to quell my emotional and vocational seasickness, it wasn’t going to be at this place. But rather than take our home off the market, I decided that what I needed was a getaway from my getaway. But where? When I’d moved into the bunker, one of the few things I’d taken with me besides the necessities was a box of stuff the kids had given me over the years: homemade cards and gifts, mostly. I pulled from the box the nautilus shell Ariane had given me one Father’s Day. Held it to my ear, listened to the sound of the ocean, and said it out loud: “Cape Cod.”
I looked online. Circled a few of the classifieds at the back of the New York Review of Books. Even though it was off-season, everything was overpriced. And later, when Annie and I finally did talk about the house, she suggested Viveca’s place. Viveca herself called me later that day and offered me the house rent-free. “It’s just sitting there, Orion. It’s yours to use if you want to.” I’d declined her offer at first but then a few days later had changed my mind. It wasn’t until after I’d said yes that I learned there was a stipulation.
Deciding that a slow crawl along the scenic road might be a relief from the bumper to bumper of the main drag, I signal and exit from Route 6 to 6-A. In Orleans, I pass that Christmas Tree Shop where Annie always wanted to stop. Look for bargains, use the restroom. Needing to pee myself, I pull into the parking lot of the Hearth & Kettle where we’d eaten a couple of times. Get out of the car, stretch, and walk on rubber legs toward the restaurant. Passing a newspaper box near the entrance, I read the Cape Cod Times headline: GREAT WHITES CURTAIL LABOR DAY FESTIVITIES. Inside, I head for the men’s room. Some would-be graffiti artist had drawn a cartoon on the wall over the urinal I was using: a shark. “Ah, a human,” it said. “Yum yum.”
Leaving the bathroom, I decide to stay, get something to eat. I wait at the hostess’s stand, looking around at all the families and couples in the dining room. Opt instead for a booth in the bar. A flush-faced young waitress approaches; her colonial cap and ankle-length checkered dress are offset by the snake tattoo crawling up her neck. “Somethin’ to drink?” she asks, passing me a menu. She has tattoos on the backs of her hands, too, I notice, but I can’t see what they say.
“Just an ice tea,” I tell her. “Unsweetened.”
She nods. “You ready to awduh aw do you need a few minutes?”
“I guess I’m ready. What kind of chowder do you have?”
Our eyes meet. “What do you mean, what kind?”
“New England? Manhattan?”
“All’s we got is New England,” she says. She asks me where I’m from and I tell her Connecticut. “Oh, okay. Newyawkachusetts. That explains it. You want a cup or a bowl?”
“A bowl,” I say.
“Cawn frittuhs with that? They’re on special. Three for a dawluh.”
I tell her no, but that I’ll take a Caesar salad. She nods. Writes on her pad. “So what do those tattoos on your hands say?” I ask.
Instead of telling me, she holds them out in front of me. The left hand says, Ask me if … The right says … I care!
After I’ve eaten and passed on dessert, my waitress brings me my bill. Eager to get back on the road, I pay in cash and leave.
At the Orleans cloverleaf, I get back on Route 6, grateful that, at last, the traffic has begun to ease. I should be getting there in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I pass that place that sells the inflatable rafts and the two-dollar T-shirts, remembering the time when we had to pull in there. Andrew had waited to tell me that he had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency. “Sorry, no public restrooms,” they’d said, and the poor kid had made a beeline for the bushes behind the place and had an accident before he reached them. Had walked back to the car in tears with a big wet spot on the front of his shorts. And when Marissa’d started giggling, her mother had threatened to forbid her from going swimming for one whole day if she didn’t cut it out. Then I’d looked in the rearview mirror at the commotion—Andrew punching his sister, her punching him back. Per Annie’s order, they’d both spent that day on the blanket instead of in the water with Ariane. “Daddy! Mom! Look at this,” she’d kept calling, so that we could watch her turning somersaults in the surf. Poor Ariane: it seems as if she was always trying to get our attention. And poor Andrew, too: he could never measure up to his twin sister’s feats, and never resist being a hothead when his little sister teased him …
“If you ask me, Dad, it’s a sickness,” Andrew had said in that phone conversation we’d had about his mother’s wedding.
I told him I disagreed, and so did the experts. “The DSM stopped classifying homosexuality as a sickness way back in 1973,” I said. “It’s as much an inevitability as blue eyes or someone’s shoe size.”
“So why’d she even marry you then? Why did she have us?”
“Because she loves you guys. And she loved me, too.”
“Yeah, well … this Vivian person?”
“Viveca,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. In that note she wrote me? When she said she hoped me and Casey can make it to the wedding because it would mean so much to Mom? Hey, sorry, lady. That ain’t gonna happen.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “It’s your decision.”
“You’re not going, are you?”
“No, probably not.”
“You’ve met her, though. Right? Mom’s … friend?”
“Uh-huh. You’ve met her, too. Do you remember that time when your mom had one of her pieces selected for the Whitney Museum show? And the five of us took the train down to New York? Stayed at that nice hotel and went to her opening?”
“Vaguely,” he said. “Was that when you took us to the NBA store and we saw Rick Fox?”
“Yup. Same trip. But I’ve seen her two or three times since then, too.”
“If you ask me, I don’t even think Mom is gay. I think she’s just mixed up. Living in New York, hanging out with all those artsy types. Who wouldn’t get their head messed up? You know what Marissa said? In this e-mail she sent me? That she thinks everyone’s bisexual, and that some people deny it and some people don’t. Now if that’s not fucked-up New York thinking, I don’t know what is. And I wouldn’t put it past that little twerp to be doing some experimenting with the lesbo stuff herself. You know how many gay bars there are in New York City?”
I said I didn’t. Did he?
“Plenty of them,” he said.
I told him I didn’t think living in New York, in and of itself, would turn anyone gay, so we were going to have to agree to disagree on that one. “And as for your sister, she’s an adult. Whatever experimenting she may or may not be doing isn’t really our business, is it?”
“Yeah, but I’m just saying … So what’s this Viveca person like, anyway? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”
“It’ll take some getting used to, Andrew. I realize that, but—”
“Don’t defend her, Dad. Mom having a wife? It’s messed up.”
“Well,