That Old Cape Magic

my imagination,” Joy said after their second meeting, “or had he forgotten me entirely?” Griffin told her not to take it personally. At the end of each semester his father still didn’t know his students’ names, except the two or three prettiest girls.
    His mother was a different story. Though polite, she’d never made a secret of her low opinion of Griffin’s choice of a mate. “Where did she do her graduate work?” was the first thing she’d wanted to know when Griffin called to say he was engaged. For her there was no greater barometer of personal worth. Moreover, when she asked people this question, they generally asked her back, and she got to say her doctorate was from Yale; if they didn’t ask, she told them anyway. In Joy’s case, she’d been expecting UCLA or Southern Cal. Griffin had anticipated this question, of course, and reminded himself there was no reason to be embarrassed to answer it, though naturally he was. He’d taken a deep breath and explained that Joy had gone directly to work after getting her undergraduate degree and that she had a good job, one she enjoyed. “Yes, but what sort of person doesn’t do graduate work?” His mother inflected theword
person
ever so slightly, as if to suggest that anyone who didn’t go to graduate school might belong to neither gender, or perhaps to both. Poor Joy had spent the first decade of their marriage trying to get her mother-in-law to think better of her, the next trying to fathom why that wasn’t happening and the one after that pretending it didn’t matter. Of late she seemed to favor getting an unlisted phone number.
    On their honeymoon, she’d paid him an unintentional compliment by asking if there was any chance he’d been adopted. Back then he bore little physical resemblance to either parent, though over the last two decades that had changed. His hair had thinned in the exact same pattern as his father’s, and his nose, delicate when he was a younger man, had started to dominate his face as well. He’d kept in reasonably good shape by jogging and playing tennis, and he didn’t weigh much more than he had when they married, but the weight had subtly begun redistributing itself, his torso becoming noticeably concave (again like his father’s), as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. With the exception of the small mole that bisected her left eyebrow and had appeared on his own in his thirties, his mother’s genetic gifts were more temperamental, if no less disturbing for that, and Joy had conceded long ago that there was no chance he’d been adopted. “That’s your mother talking,” she was fond of observing whenever he was unkind or snobbish, especially about someone in her own family.
    “She wants me to visit,” Griffin told her now.
    “Of course she does.”
    “She doesn’t like her new place.”
    “Of course she doesn’t.”
    “She’s going to live forever.”
    “No, but she’ll make it seem like forever.”
    The first thing he’d done when arriving at the restaurant was to wash his shirtsleeve in the men’s room. Though he thoughthe’d done a good, thorough job, he could smell it again. “When she called, I pulled over onto the shoulder, and a gull took a shit on me.”
    But Joy had lost interest in the subject, just as she often did with stories at what he considered their most vivid and interesting point. “Have you called your daughter yet?”
    Your
daughter, rather than
our
, usually meant that in Joy’s opinion he was shirking some important parental duty. “She doesn’t get here until this afternoon, right?”
    “She’s been on the Cape since yesterday. She’s in the wedding party, remember?”
    Well, now that he thought about it, he did. “I’ll call her when I get to the B and B,” he promised.
    “Good. She could use some reassuring.”
    “About what?”
    “She can’t understand why we’re arriving in separate cars. Explain that to her, will you? Then she can explain it to me.”
    Griffin sighed. He’d succeeded in deflecting Joy from her purpose by complaining about his mother, but now they’d circled back. Best to get it over with and apologize. “I should’ve waited for you,” he admitted, pausing a beat before adding, “Boston wasn’t much fun without you.” And, when she still didn’t say anything, “I meant to spite you and ended up spiting myself… Are you still there?”
    “I’m here.”
    “I hope you aren’t waiting for me to humble myself