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End of The IslandAlice Stern
“Your vertebrae,” Alan marvels as he hugs me, pressing me against him, “they’re so superficial. I can’t get over what superficial vertebrae you have. I can feel each one.”
He is an artist, not a surgeon.
“You should have been a surgeon,” I say, mourning for what might have been. I imagine a surgeon husband, a vision of us living in affluence, new cars instead of used ones that break down on our way to visit a child at camp; a permanent vacation home, no college financial aid forms to fill out. “Wouldn’t you like to be a surgeon?”
I offer to put him through medical school, late in our life as it is. I’ll scrimp and save. “Scrimp and save,” I like the sound of that. But Alan says no, he wouldn’t like to be a surgeon, he wouldn’t like to be anything except, he adds morosely, to be left alone. “That’s all I really want—to be left alone.”
We’re having our Saturday evening cocktail, a moment I’ve waited for, to give me courage for what I have to ask. “Who,” I accost him, “is Dieringer?”
“Dieringer, Dieringer? I don’t know any Dieringer. It means ‘the ringer’ in German.”
“You made out a check to him for two thousand dollars. You left your checkbook on the car seat Thursday morning.” I refrain from adding how punished I was for snooping, how I dated that Thursday as the end of our life together, life as we have known it. He is into drug traffic, he has a lover, male, female; all three or any one means the end.
Alan looks puzzled. “Dieringer,” he repeats. Then takes a slow reproving sip of his Scotch. “Derringer, you must mean, Derringer, not Dieringer. I know my handwriting is pretty bad.”
His handwriting isn’t all that bad, but he takes pride in its being bad, considers it fundamental to who he is.
He peers at me long and hard. “I would never have opened your checkbook. Derringer's this guy I know, drinking buddy when I go out.” (Alan regularly takes Monday nights out. I have long refused to stop arguing about it; my protests have become feebly rhetorical. He brings me his Monday night shirt with a button off and I sew the button back on.)
“Ernie Derringer’s built a colony of cottages,” he continues, “on spec, at the end of the island. Not too far from the ocean. Just your sort of thing. Small and brand new. You like things that are small and brand new,” he says, knowing how oppressed I am by our house which is big and old and subject to break downs like our cars. “So I rented one for August—I was going to surprise you but now”—he gives me a look of delicate reproof—“now you’ve rather spoiled it, haven’t you?”
I hang my head.
The children, informed of their father’s surprise, chortle agreeably. Though I detect a certain reserve in the chortling of the older three.
“Oh wow!” says Beatrice, when I ring her up at college. “A month at the beach! That’s great, Mom!” But shortly thereafter she announces other plans, a daytime job in a book store, evenings dipping ice cream at Baskin Robbins, can’t join me after all. Sorry Mom. Then Robbie declines; then Sally. They’ve elected to spend their summers pursuing music and salvation, respectively. The healthy ballast of a large family, which has long served its intended purpose of keeping me from chronic depression (getting supper on the table at six every night is an antidepressant), has suddenly dwindled to a mere two. Our two youngest—Richard and Victoria.
“They hate each other,” Alan remarks as casually as if he were commenting on the weather.
“Don’t say that! Don’t say ‘hate.’”
“Why not? If it’s true.”
I remind him, not for the first time, of what my father once said to me and my older sister. It was during one of our last colloquies after we’d succumbed to being brainwashed against our parents by an insidious Daphne du Maurier-type housekeeper.
“Well,” my dad had sighed, “at least I see the two of you are friends.” He assumed his daughters were friends because my sister and I were sitting together in opposition to him, when in fact we were cut throat rivals for the affections of the Daphne du Maurier housekeeper.
“Above all be loyal to each other,” was the poor man’s parting blessing. “Stay friends no matter what happens. My brother and I have always been friends.”
“My father,” I remind Alan, “believed in family loyalty.”
“Nonsense. I don’t believe in those shibboleths—that blood is thicker than water stuff, sheer sentimentality. And it’s perfectly obvious,” he went on about Richard and Vicky, “they hate each other.”
“My father wouldn’t have liked your saying that.”
“Your father,” was Alan’s response, “should have kicked both you and your sister’s asses and disowned you. And he should have kicked that housekeeper’s ass. That’s what I would have done.”
A month in the country. A month by the sea, well, near the sea, a mere five miles. I ring up my primary care physician to get my prescription renewed. She is a comfortable sort of woman who supplies my modest needs without fuss, commenting, “We all need a little something sometimes.” In return for which I don’t complain about answering the phone at all hours of day and night, cheerfully advising her patients they’ve reached the wrong number and supplying them with the correct one, which differs from ours by one slippery digit.
I ring up my woman and find she is on vacation. A male doctor is filling in for her. I ask him for a prescription for my pills. He works me over brutally.
“I don’t like this,” he snarls through the phone. “What do you want ‘em for?”
I’m stymied, my nice woman never asks, seems to know.
“The cottage I’m going to is very small, it doesn’t have screens yet, and my two youngest children hate each other.”
He is not amused. “I don’t see what you need Valium for.”
“Seven,” he says finally and magisterially. “I’m going to let you have seven.”
“Oh, that’s the number in my family!” I say brightly. If I joke maybe he won’t think I’m at risk. Again he’s not amused.
“Seven!” he says angrily. “Seven and that’s all.”
The six little orange pills rattle in their vial. I’ve already twisted off the childproof cap, pulled out the cotton, and taken one. I took one because I’m devastated. Richy isn’t coming. Changed his mind at the last minute. Said he didn’t want to be stuck with me and his stupid little sister; wants to stay home with his dad and his stereo. It cuts me to the quick. The way it used to when my friends left me. I used to have dear friends, playmates, and one by one they left me because I drove them off. Borderline personality disorder they call it now. Then I had five children thinking that way I would have five playmates who would never leave me. Even if I were angry and depressed. They’d have to stick with me, I’M THEIR MOTHER! But this summer-cottage thing has turned out like the nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians. Only five—five little Indians sitting on a fence. One flew away and then there were four. Skip to two little Indians sitting on a fence. One flew away and then there was one. Ten year old Vicky. Where can she go, poor thing, except with Mommy?
Alan, of course, will have no part of this vacation. The last thing he wants:
“Stuck in a tiny cottage, how many square feet did Derringer say? I forget, stuck with your moods and a child who hasn’t reached the age of intelligence yet so I can enjoy having conversations with her. And I have to work, remember?, to pay for it.”
Nevertheless, he’s undertaken to drive us down and settle us in. He performs this as he does all tasks, with honor, pulling up in front of the cottage as a brilliant sky and a white hot sun begin to soften into pink.
“A perfect day! An absolutely perfect beach day,” he says sadly. “Too bad. You’ll probably never have another one like it.”
We unload the station wagon, the cartons packed providentially with second best towels and second best bedding and Vicky’s brand new summer clothing, her sweetly pastel little shorts and tops and sun dresses, still smelling of the manufacturer’s sizing. I like to bury my nose in that smell, inhaling its promise of fun and good times.
We get back in the car and race the five miles to the IGA before it closes, and assemble the makings of a first meal, the first al fresco of the summer in the cottage’s minuscule backyard. It’s a doll house cottage and we’re the first tenants. There are still red and white stickers on the windows that say GLASS! and UL listings attached to the appliances. I fling open the kitchen drawers half expecting to see the interesting muddle of debris we’ve always found in rented summer places. I could never resist cleaning them out—old keys and string and bottle caps and match books, scribbled lists.
“Stop!” Alan would say. “You have no right to throw those things out. They might be important.”
“Warranties for appliances that no longer exist?
Here the drawers are empty. No traces of the lives of others, no ghosts. I rejoice; my own ghosts are enough to bear.
“Do you like it?” Alan asks. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Everything new?”
“I didn’t think it would be like this.” I say mournfully.
“Like what?”
“All alone. Virtually alone,” I say out of Vicky’s hearing. “I didn’t think it would be this way. I thought we’d be family.”
At a little round metal table we eat the prototype of all the vacation suppers to come: Banquet fried chicken cooked in a Broil-a-Foil tray, Reddi-Pac salad with Wishbone dressing, frozen and heated Pepperidge Farm garlic bread, Good Humor truck for Vicky, vodka and tonics for Alan and myself.
“I didn’t think it would be this way,” I say again to my soon-to-depart husband.
“You said that already. Drink your drink, you’ll feel better.”
I don’t feel better. I begin to drip tears over the chicken and salad. My nose runs. I push my plate back. Richy will not come. Nor Beatrice nor Sally nor Rob. The playmates I gave birth to won’t play with me. Alan will leave. I’m alone with my youngest; and what will happen when she won’t come, too? When she starts working in a book store and dipping ice cream? I smart with rejection, grieve for the loss of those who are not here, and for all the losses of the past, my parents, my school friends and for all the losses to come. Alan makes strong drinks; it’s the way he does everything.
I begin to cry in earnest and Vicky, helpless, pats my hand. I am on my second vodka and tonic. No, third. I have sinned. Borderline personality disorder is an insufficient excuse. I put my head down, and sob with abandon, using the metal table top for a deservedly hard pillow.
“Don’t!” Alan says. “Please! Stop! Pull yourself together, I beg of you. The neighbors, you’ll be overheard!”
Poor Mom. Bad time—summer. It’s nearing her birthday; birthday in August. It’s the changing of the guard, a cruel shift, the approach of summer, spilling the children from one grade into the next, the newer, the fearsome one level up. The long winter glides slowly, unsuspectingly along whispering, “No change! no change!” By the school year’s end everything runs perfectly, all wrinkles are smoothed, everything works and is lovely; why can’t it stay? Comes the summer, the last day of school, the children so pretty—my God, what did I do to deserve this flock of pretty children coming down the road toward home? The last day of school’s a half day, they’re home for lunch. I go to meet them and they break into a run when they see me, down the road they come, already in their summer clothes, waving their report cards. It’s always a sunny day, so that it hurts more that the year is over. Kindergarten becomes first grade, second grade becomes third and so on till it’s all over, they’re gone. I can hear the creak, the wrench of the wheel turning.
“Stop it, please,” Alan says. “Take one of your pills if you must, but please stop. We’re being observed, the neighbors!”
Alan’s frenzy is occasioned by two shadowy figures in the adjoining bosky dell (these cottages and their back yards are chock-a-block). Two bodies at a similar metal table are intricately entwined. In the gathering dusk they give no sign of life. They have not moved since we came out.
“Please,” Alan implores me, “not in front of the Italian neighbors.” He has no more idea than I do that this effigy, these embracing two-become-one are Italian. It’s a kind of unexplainable tic of his that he assumes all unknown neighbors are Italian. Sometimes he pronounces it Eye-tralian.
My own mind runs to media types. I’m sure the shadowy figures in the next yard are city people, young and stunningly attractive and successful, everything I'm not. But years from now Alan will say to the children, “I’ll never forget that first night at the cottage when your mother made a spectacle of herself in front of the Itralian neighbors.”
Meanwhile the entwined pair have not stirred.
“Why should you care?” I weep. “You’re not staying.”
“What is it you want for God’s sake?”
“My family. Altogether. And also separately. I want everyone together and I want to be one on one with each. At the same time.”
“That’s impossible and you know it. Please, pull yourself together, if not for my sake,” he says in a lowered voice, “for Vicky’s.” The latter has run out to the front of the cottage to flag the Good Humor truck.
The next day Alan makes an early and swift departure. I drive him soberly to the train.
“Be good,” he directs me. “And please—try to have some fun.” He leaves the station wagon with me.
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