“You’re a mess,” she said, not unkindly.
His father lowered his voice then, but Griffin could hear him anyway. “She doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to me. You know that.”
His mother shook her head in despair. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this anymore. Either one of us.”
“We did. I don’t know what comes over me. I hate myself. Really, you’ve no idea how much. I don’t know why you have anything to do with me.”
His mother allowed herself to be gathered into his arms then, and they stood there for a long time without speaking. “Okay,” she finally said, as if surrendering something large, something she’d meant to cling to. “We’re on the Cape.”
“And it’s great.”
She nodded, surveying the cottage and the entire compound once again. Griffin could tell that while nothing had changed, things looked better to her now than they had ten minutes ago. She took his father’s hand and examined the splinter more closely. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find some tweezers.”
“Hello, Indiana!” came a hearty male voice, and when Griffin looked up, the two kids and their parents were coming toward them, waving enthusiastically. Apparently they’d noticed the out-of-state license. Griffin saw both his parents stiffen at being personally linked with the Mid-fucking-west. When they turned to greet the other family, he couldn’t see their faces anymore but knew they were offering the newcomers their most forced, rigid, unnatural smiles, the ones that convinced exactly no one, but, because they were identical, carried a certain authority. He noticed his mother had put her arm around his father’s waist, which meant that at least as far as these people were concerned, they were a single entity again, with the same contemptuous mind.
Strange, Griffin thought, opening his eyes on the present. He’d used none of this in “The Summer of the Brownings.” He’d meant for the story to be about the Brownings and felt that his parents, or rather the parents of the boy in the story, had already taken up too much narrative space. He’d wanted to focus on his friendship with Peter, with a subplot on the crush he’d had on the boy’s mother, the dawn of something like sexual awareness in a twelve-year-old. Except this wasn’t what the experience had been about. The idea that there might be something seriously wrong between his parents had not been new that summer. Their unhappiness, together and separately, had been a given throughout his childhood. That was why they needed the Cape, even more each passing year, to make things right between them, at least for a while. The Browning summer was just the first when he’d begun to understand what ailed them. If he’d had a true sexual awakening that summer it was this: what was wrong between his parents was about sex. At the time, that was as precise as he could make it, and he yearned neither for additional information nor further illumination. Indeed, to keep these at bay he’d escaped into that other, happier family. The Brownings had offered the refuge he needed, though any happy family would have probably served the same purpose, which meant he hadn’t so much told the story of that summer as avoided telling it. That was why a puzzled Tommy had concluded it must be about a kid discovering he was gay. Poor fucking kid, he’d said, perhaps sensing the presence of the real story that never got written. Griffin looked up at the dark window under the eaves now, half expecting to see his own worried twelve-year-old face still framed there.
The irony of all this, Griffin realized, was one even Tommy, who’d once jokingly asked him to explain irony, would appreciate. Because Griffin had attempted to do in the Browning summer story precisely what his wife was now accusing him of having done in their marriage: he’d tried but failed to keep his parents out. Right from the start (of the story, of his marriage), despite his best efforts, they’d managed to insinuate themselves. When Joy suggested they honeymoon on the Maine coast, Griffin convinced her that what they needed was a dose of the old Cape magic, that weakest of marital spells. In Truro they’d made plans for a life based on what they foolishly thought were their own terms, Joy articulating what she wanted, Griffin, tellingly, what he didn’t want (a marriage that even remotely resembled his parents’, as if this negative were a nifty substitute for an unimagined positive). Even as he rejected their values, he’d allowed many of their bedrock assumptions-that happiness was a place you could visit but never own, for instance-to burrow deep. He’d dismissed their snobbery and unearned sense of entitlement, but swallowed whole the rationale on which it had been based (Can’t Afford It; Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift). Joy’s contention that his parents, not hers, were the true intruders in their marriage had seemed ludicrous on the face of it, but he saw now that it was true. They were mucking about still, his living mother, exiled in the Mid-fucking-west (justice, that) but using seagulls as surrogates, his deceased father, reduced to ash and bits of bone, still refusing to take his leave.
He’d tried. Joy probably wouldn’t believe him, but he had tried. Failed, sure, awkwardly and foolishly, but was he not his father’s son? He’d gone out a good twenty yards into the cold surf, turning his back to the waves as they broke, holding his father out in front of him with both hands like a priest with a chalice, as if keeping the urn dry until the precise moment of submergence were a necessary part of the idiotic liturgy. He’s haunted you this whole year, Joy had accused. Right now he’s in the trunk of your car, and you cant bring yourself to scatter his ashes. Do you think maybe that means something? And so, by God, as soon as he was waist-deep, he’d put an end to the folly.
Except that when he plunged the urn into the turbulence and positioned his thumbs under the latch that secured the lid, the sand beneath his feet gave way to the very undertow his father had always feared, and Griffin lost his balance. To regain it, he held his arms out to his sides like a surfer. Had he dropped the urn then, or had the next wave knocked it out of his hands? He couldn’t remember. One second he had it; the next it had disappeared into the churning froth. Lost, he remembered thinking as he lunged after it, feeling around in the surf with both hands like a blind man until the next wave, larger, knocked him flat. Regaining his feet, he thought, My father is lost. Hilarious, really. After all, he’d been dead for nine months. But he was lost only now, this instant, and somehow this was worse than dead, because dead wasn’t something Griffin could be blamed for.
How long had he stood there, paralyzed, mortified by his clumsy incompetence, wave after wave leaping past him onto the shore? Do something, he thought, panicked, but what? How many times as a boy had he watched his father seize up in the middle of a room, a portrait of indecision, with no idea of where to turn, an angry wife tugging him in one direction, a pretty grad student who’d confused him with the romantic hero of some novel they’d been studying pulling him in the opposite? It was as if he’d concluded that if he remained where he was long enough, whatever he wanted most would come to him of its own volition. Griffin remembered willing him to act, to do something, because it frightened him to see anybody stand frozen in one place for so long, unable to take that first step, the one that implied a destination. Now, waist-deep in the roiling surf, the sands shifting dangerously beneath his feet, he finally understood. Because of course it was the doing that had brought him to this pass, and now, having done the wrong thing, the thing he never would’ve done if he’d been thinking clearly, there was nothing further to do but hope that chance, not known for compassion, would intervene in his undeserving favor.