Dear Life

I don’t know if it happened to any of the other volunteers. I do know, though I don’t remember it, that my father wept and for a whole day followed my mother around the house, not letting her out of his sight and refusing to believe her. And,instead of telling him anything to make him feel better, she told him something that made him feel worse.
    She told him that the baby was Neal’s.
    Was she sure?
    Absolutely. She had been keeping track.
    What happened then?
    My father gave up weeping. He had to get back to work. My mother packed up our things and took us to live with Neal in the trailer he had found, out in the country. She said afterwards that she had wept too. But she said also that she had felt alive. Maybe for the first time in her life, truly alive. She felt as if she had been given a chance; she had started her life all over again. She’d walked out on her silver and her china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read. She’d left her clothes hanging in the closet and her high-heeled shoes in their shoe trees. Her diamond ring and her wedding ring on the dresser. Her silk nightdresses in their drawer. She meant to go around naked at least some of the time in the country, as long as the weather stayed warm.
    That didn’t work out, because when she tried it Caro went and hid in her cot and even Neal said he wasn’t crazy about the idea.
    What did he think of all this? Neal. His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.
    I am suspicious of people who talk like this, but I can’t say that I have a right to be.
    He was not really an actor. He had got into acting, he said,as an experiment. To see what he could find out about himself. In college, before he dropped out, he had performed as part of the Chorus in
Oedipus Rex
. He had liked that—the giving yourself over, blending with others. Then one day, on the street in Toronto, he ran into a friend who was on his way to try out for a summer job with a new small-town theater company. He went along, having nothing better to do, and ended up getting the job, while the other fellow didn’t. He would play Banquo. Sometimes they make Banquo’s Ghost visible, sometimes not. This time they wanted a visible version and Neal was the right size. An excellent size. A solid ghost.
    He had been thinking of wintering in our town anyway, before my mother sprang her surprise. He had already spotted the trailer. He had enough carpentry experience to pick up work renovating the theater, which would see him through till spring. That was as far ahead as he liked to think.
    Caro didn’t even have to change schools. She was picked up by the school bus at the end of the short lane that ran alongside the gravel pit. She had to make friends with the country children, and perhaps explain some things to the town children who had been her friends the year before, but if she had any difficulty with that I never heard about it.
    Blitzee was always waiting by the road for her to come home.
    I didn’t go to kindergarten, because my mother didn’t have a car. But I didn’t mind doing without other children. Caro, when she got home, was enough for me. And my mother was often in a playful mood. As soon as it snowed that winter she and I built a snowman and she asked, “Shallwe call it Neal?” I said okay, and we stuck various things on it to make it funny. Then we decided that I would run out of the house when his car came and say, Here’s Neal, here’s Neal! but be pointing up at the snowman. Which I did, but Neal got out of the car mad and yelled that he could have run me over.
    That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.
    Those short winter days must have seemed strange to me—in town, the lights came on at dusk. But children get used to changes. Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where it had gone.
    My mother’s good times with Neal went on into the night. If I woke up and had to go to the bathroom, I’d call for her. She would come happily but not in any hurry, with some piece of cloth or a scarf wrapped around her—also a smell that I associated with candlelight and music. And love.
    Something did happen that was not so reassuring, but I didn’t try to make much sense of it at the time. Blitzee, our dog, was not very big, but