All Happy Families Read online

  “Did you tell her about all your summers? What about when you girls were with Marie-Jeanne in the Valais?”

  One summer when we were teenagers, my sisters and I were sent to stay with the family of our au pair, Marie-Jeanne, who lived in the Valais, a narrow valley in the French part of Switzerland, streaked with knotty grapevines and hillsides dotted with milk cows. Although in truth we only visited for a week, my mother often credited that journey as proof of our credentials as French-speaking country girls. Marie-Jeanne had a brother, François, who had given me my first taste of wine and later my first kiss.

  In June, in the Valais, women and children go to pick strawberries from the patches around the canton. Strong, ruddy women hike up their skirts, crouch low to the ground, and gather the berries into rumpled paper bags brought from home. Children race between the rows of bushes, staining clothes and knees a muddy red.

  “They act like you had a subnormal childhood. Which you did not. Not if I had anything to do with it. Worrying about the picking of beans. You’ve picked berries in languages they’ve never even heard of, baby girl. Beans. Have you ever.”

  All in all, I’d had seven visits to Camden by the time of Dean’s and my wedding. After the visit of the beans, there was the visit of the dead cat, when the wife of the high school basketball coach got Mook, the family tabby, mixed up in the dryer with the wet sheets. Then there was the visit on the lake, when one summer Raymond and Helen rented a cabin on Lake Megunticook and it rained all week and everyone got sick. After that, there was the visit of the divorces, when the minister of the Congregational church in town, the “Congo,” came out of the closet and moved in with a young man from Belfast, and Raymond and Helen’s friends Rick and Jan broke up for a few chaotic months after a weekend at an EST retreat, leaving kids confused and scattered all over Helen’s living room. Through it all Helen made fudge and cheese sticks, and the fifth visit was the visit of the games: Trivial Pursuit, Fictionary, charades, every night after dinner. “Oh, I love it,” Helen would cry, her hand coming down hard on her thigh, full of the spirit of combat and red wine. “I love a good game.” The sixth visit was the visit of the camping trip, when Dean and I spent two days at Baxter State Park. We hiked long trails Dean knew by heart from his boyhood. I followed behind, and in his casual assurance as he walked the familiar area I found a kind of peace. We slept curled in an embrace in a tent by a pond, and in the clear morning air made pancakes from a mix over a campfire, scrutinized by a family of deer.

  Often when we visited, Raymond and Helen drove down Route 1 to Portland to pick us up at the bus station. They tended to do something cute together on the way down. One year they did all their Christmas shopping at L.L.Bean. Another year they walked the beach in Small Point with a bottle of bourbon and a transistor radio.

  My seventh visit was the visit of the moonstones, when Dean and I sailed over to nearby Barred Island and anchored for a night in the cove. On the coarse brown sand, there were moonstones. The stones were smooth and jet-black, gleaming when wet like the backs of the harbor seals. The flat, wide ones made the best skippers, Dean told me. He showed me how to hold the stone in the crook of my hand between thumb and forefinger, cock my wrist back, and snap it so the stone launched level over the surface of the water. Upon contact, the moonstone skimmed the glassy surface in quick hops, first making big splashes, then smaller and smaller, finally infinitesimal ones before slipping underwater into the bay.

  When he was younger, Dean and his father used to sail over to Barred Island and stand at the shore skipping stones together, the two of them side by side discussing school life (Dean) and town news (Raymond), eyes steady on the water and arms swinging.

  “The record’s sixteen,” he told me.

  “Sixteen skips, with one rock?”

  “Stone.”

  “Stone.”

  As he demonstrated the technique, skipping stones over and over, I stood beside him and drew Christmas trees in the wet sand with my toe. He could throw stones in the water forever, I began to think. I put a handful of moonstones in my pocket and we walked along the beach, the stones lightly knocking against my thigh as we walked. That night we slept on the boat, anchored in the quiet. The moon was a crescent, and there were hundreds of stars out, turning the sky milky.

  One day, Raymond had told us, he wanted grandchildren so he could teach them how to navigate by the stars. “Boat-nut grandkids” is what he called them. I pictured them all, with broad, featureless faces like moons. They’d be seated with Raymond in a rowboat, and they’d follow his arm up as he pointed to the sky. “This is how we do it,” he’d be telling them. “This is how we learn to be guided by stars.”

  Dean and I lay on our backs on the deck of the boat in the cove that night, a lantern hung on the mast for light. For a while when he was nineteen Dean worked on a boat. There were ten of them on that boat then, ten young men growing their first beards, carrying cargo back and forth between ports of call in the Caribbean. Talking about it, Dean got a relaxed, dreamy look on his face, remembering the warm tropical sun, the constant slap and splash of the current against the boat, the easy, jostling friendships he developed then. When we were out on a night filled with stars, he would talk about the hours he spent on watch: just him, the deck, the water, the sky, when everything in his life was just about to happen.

  Sometimes, when he looked up at the stars, I knew Dean was back on his cargo boat. He’d smile, but it would always end with a long sigh. What is nostalgia, anyway. It isn’t happy; it’s a tug at the heart. “I was so young then,” he’d say, even though it was only six years ago. Now, as he watched, he could see the long, mysterious edges of his life neatly folding in.

  After Dean fell asleep, I took one of the moonstones I’d been keeping in my pocket and launched it out into the quiet of the night. It didn’t skip, exactly, but made a huge splash upon hitting the water, hopped once, and promptly sunk. Hearing the splash, Dean jolted suddenly, thinking something had gone overboard, something was awry. It was the quick reflex of a sailor, trained to keep a weather eye even in sleep. But of course everything was fine, still intact, same as usual, and soon he settled back into dreams. Only the dark water still recorded the splashes. Where everything in the cove at Barred Island had once been peaceful, serene, suddenly the reflections of lantern, the moon, the night sky all trembled, in the water, with worry.

  In marrying Dean, I had chosen to marry the boy next door, in the sense that he lived in the room next door to mine in college. It was not the next door my mother had had in mind all the years she spent daydreaming with the Social Register in her lap, but it was the next door I chose.

  Dean was a tall boy with dark curls I had first seen loping across our college campus with engineering books and a silver earring in his left lobe. We had never much spoken until a week before graduation, when we stayed up all one night explaining our senior theses to each other. I tried to explain all British and American literature since 1910, making a chaos of books I pulled from my shelves and laid open on the bed, and he explained Einstein’s theory of relativity. I read him small offerings of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf as he lay propped on my pillows listening, his long legs crossed at the ankles, wearing nubby rag socks too warm for the early June evening. By the time the birds were announcing the coming day, we’d moved the discussion into my bed. I liked his cleft chin and his whisper in the dark. Even if what he was whispering that first night was E equals m c-squared. And I liked that he played the entire Joni Mitchell songbook on his guitar in the campus coffeehouse wearing a bandanna on his head. This tall boy with a soft whisper in the dark and an earring in his left lobe, this Maine boy destined for a lab coat had my heart.

  Somewhere along the line, between the visit of the lake and the visit of the divorces, I erected a white picket fence in my mind around Dean and his family, around the whole town of Camden, and I wanted to be on the inside of that fence, where the kitchen always smelled like fresh fruit pies baking and the
afternoon sun glazed the old linoleum floor the color of marigolds; where the view from the top of the attic stairs gave out onto the harbor and from there to Penobscot Bay. Dean had been the local high school basketball champion, and people still stopped him on the street in town to recount match highlights from his winning season senior year. His family sang songs at night, Dean and his brothers all tenors, Raymond a bass, his sister a soprano. “Sit next to me,” Helen would say, “I’m singing closest to your range,” and I’d sit, Helen’s rich alto in my ear, and try to follow her lead.

  The visit on the lake, Helen knit me a sweater.

  “I’m here with my city girl,” she said to Marjorie in the wool shop as we walked in, the bell above the door clanging as she flung it open. The sweater was a deep claret red. She knit it during the long rainy week on Lake Megunticook, sitting in an easy chair by the wood-burning stove. “I think you could have fun with this,” she said, her mouth a gentle smile. I watched as the rich red yarn took form. Something fun. Something warm.

  On the bulletin board above the sewing table off the kitchen, Helen had a pamphlet from Skidmore College featuring a 1950s-era black-and-white photograph of girls in white tunics seated in neat rows of austere wooden desks.

  “What is home economics?” the pamphlet asked. And answered, “It is the field of study dealing with the management of the home and its place in the broader community.”

  Helen’s father, Lester Greene, used to joke that Helen’s Skidmore piecrust, a family favorite, was the most expensive piecrust recipe in the entire world. “Hope you all like it,” he’d tell guests, “because it cost me dearly. Four years’ college tuition. That damn piecrust.”

  Helen and her mother, Nonnie, each had a metal file box with the family recipes written out on index cards. At the bottom of each card, they signed their name. It was their work of art. When Dean and I got engaged, they made me one. It was in gray metal file boxes that family secrets were handed down, one generation to the next, the most coveted being Lester Greene’s recipe for a clambake. You had to marry into the family to get that one.

  On the index card Helen gave me with her piecrust recipe, she had added a note: “Patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.” And then she signed it, as she did all her recipe cards, “H. Jackson.”

  I’d watch her knitting needles fly as my sweater grew in her lap. What could I say, I wondered, what could anyone say, to Helen’s carefully patterned, deliberate life. She had drawn her children safe within her white picket fence, where she fed them pie and knit them sweaters. To my mind, the gate around that fence was always welcoming, and always secure. Family secrets involved flour and shortening and the correct layering of seafood in a pot, not assumed foreign accents and cans of Budweiser at breakfast. I wanted in.

  Ever since Dean’s younger brother, Chris, left for college, Raymond and Helen had lived in the family house alone.

  For a while Dean worried about his parents, on their own suddenly in the house after the bustle of family life, and he called all the time to check in. “What are you up to?” he’d ask. “What have you two fuds been doing?”

  “Oh, just running around the house naked,” Raymond would say, “isn’t that right, Mother?” On another extension, Helen would laugh.

  The thought of Raymond with his spindly legs, his gold spectacles, his slight paunch, and Helen, large, white, square, running naked through the halls of his childhood home didn’t amuse Dean. “Fact is,” he’d tell me when he’d hang up, “it’s really not as funny as they think.”

  Helen kept a photograph in a silver frame on her mahogany dresser. It was a black-and-white photo of her and Raymond during their courtship, seated at a white cast-iron table in Nonnie’s garden. Helen is in a stiff organdy dress, Raymond in his white Navy uniform. Raymond holds his teacup in his hands and smiles. Some of these details are timeless: the platter of raw vegetables with Nonnie’s special curry pineapple dip, the alabaster garden ornaments, cherubs in balletic poses among the hydrangeas. The photograph is taken from above, so Nonnie must have been spying on them, peeking out from her bedroom window to snap the photograph because it was such an occasion. Young Raymond Jackson, a Harvard man, was back in town from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and he was there in her garden with her only daughter, having afternoon tea. And her heart always fluttered, Nonnie’s did, when she saw a man in a uniform.

  The night before our wedding, the rehearsal dinner, was to be Raymond and Helen’s evening. They had planned a traditional New England clambake on the beach in front of the long gray house by the sea. Helen had spoken at length to John Haessler, the owner of the Seafood Shop, whose staff would be replicating what, in the Jackson family, was known only as “Grampa’s Bake.” Offered up to their new family, Dean’s future in-laws, the bake was, in Jackson family terms, an offering of their heart.

  In Dean’s family, there was a strict order to this bake. Key placement was the lobster. Years of experience had taught Helen’s father, Lester Greene, the founder of the family recipe, that the lobster gets overcooked if it’s put at the bottom.

  “Most people make this common mistake,” Helen told Haessler. “It’s important you place the lobsters on top.” She asked him to take notes as she went on. “Then, when unpacking the bake, put the lobsters between layers of hot rockweed to keep them warm for serving last. That last note is very important to get right.”

  Raymond and Helen had mailed the family recipe to Haessler, and it arrived at his shop on Route 27 with a note stapled on top saying, “If you guys follow this, you cannot go wrong. Trust us Mainiacs!” and Raymond and Helen both signed their names.

  “We serve up a lot of meals this way, ma’am,” Haessler had assured Helen on the phone after reviewing her instructions. John and his partner, Robert Wilford, were two local schoolteachers who had started their business in a little shop on the main route east between Wainscott and East Hampton in 1972. Until then the only places that serviced the towns were miles and miles away, in Montauk and in Three Mile Harbor.

  “A bake is not just a meal, though, my good man,” Helen emphasized to the caterer. “It’s a gala event. We’re talking here about giving up an entire day. In our family, we find it’s best to plan and sleep by the site.”

  It was one of the things Helen missed most, clambakes on the beach when her children were young, when they’d bring enough blankets and sleeping bags to camp by the fire and watch the stars. She and Raymond would sit together by the fire, the kids curled up nearby in their sleeping bags. They would lean in against each other, one blanket draped over both their shoulders, and watch the sleeping bodies of their children rise and fall with each breath as slowly the embers died.

  On the roof of the family station wagon, Raymond had tied a brand-new green canoe. Raymond was a snob about boats. He readily admitted that. After the Navy, he had started a publishing career based on wooden boats—writing magazine articles about them, publishing books about them, as well as sailing in them—and to his mind the only acceptable water-going vessel was made of wood. That said, the canoe on the top of the car was fiberglass so it would be lightweight enough to be portable. Around its midsection at Helen’s insistence he had tied streamers of green and yellow ribbon, thick ribbons three inches wide so the effect would make a festive statement as they arrived in East Hampton, rounding the long driveway that curved up to the house with a boat on the roof, ribbons flapping.

  In the back of the station wagon, Helen had placed a picnic basket with matching ribbons tied in a bow and two life preservers in clear plastic wrappers. She’d bought a card with a watercolor image of the Owl and the Pussy-cat from the bookshop in town. “Kids,” Helen wrote on the card, “To get you started on your journey together, a beautiful pea green boat.”

  She folded her belongings into her suitcase. Bathing suit, tennis whites, slacks and a sweater, because at night it would be cold. She had knit a wool shawl to wear the night of the wedding, creamy white angora wool, using a dainty loos
e stitch, with a delicate gold filigree piping along the edge. It was to go over her sea-foam dress. It would be a fun look.

  Setting out for the wedding, a green canoe decorated in long ribbons strapped on the roof of their car, Raymond wanted no curveballs, and Helen wanted to have fun. Later they would look back at the photographs from the wedding and Helen would say, “Daddy looks old and I look fat.” Her mother, Nonnie, would frame only the photograph of the table setting, a picture of a round table set for ten, pearl-white plates with gold trim on a white damask tablecloth, pink napkins; clear green bud vases held baby-pink roses and sprays of lilies of the valley and were placed beside each napkin. She had sent her youngest grandson, Chris, down to take the photograph of the tables while everyone else was still up in the garden. She wanted to be sure he snapped it, she said, before the festivities began and the tables got all mussed by guests eating and drinking and kicking up their heels. She wanted to have a picture of the perfect table setting to remember Dean’s wedding by.

  On the mantel in her living room, Nonnie lined up photographs of table settings from each of the family weddings. She knew which table setting belonged to which wedding. So if a visitor pointed, she could say whose wedding it had been. It was important to remember that because, she said, a marriage may not last forever, and then no matter how beautiful it was, what do you do with the picture? Who needs a photograph of someone’s ex on the mantel? A table setting, though. That’s something else. A table setting is forever.

  TO: John Haessler, The Seafood Shop, Wainscott, NY

  FROM: Raymond and Helen Jackson, 34 High Street, Camden, Maine 04843

  RE: McCulloch beachfront clambake 8/12/83