Green Light

The day before Thanksgiving I had a cold; nevertheless I took a walk. I turned off my own busy street and onto the quieter streets behind, where the houses are now worth above a million dollars and are kept up decently—the last few neighborhood embarrassments, the Boo Radley houses, have been bought and shoehorned into conformity with the standards of respectability that prevail. Pretty houses, nice yards, most now dotted with dried up brown leaves, expensive cars in the driveways, Christmas decorations popping up. A couple of houses had swings hanging from trees branches, and they aroused an ache in me. I carry inside a list of things I wanted starting in childhood, and a tree swing is among them. I don’t expect I shall ever have a tree swing, and I am at peace with that. Yet the sight of them in the grey dusk carried me through a sliding door into a life I also wanted, also imagined, a life where my aesthetic ambitions were focused on house and garden, where I had five children, where I didn’t have to work because I married a person who had lots of money, where I spent my nights thinking up ways to add beauty and grace to the lives of my children and friends. Yes, I am a home to an inner tradwife. It was that side of me that looked at the large, family-sized, glowing, neighborhood houses as if I were a little match girl, ever shut away from being part of a big happy family. Ridiculous! I scolded myself, before my yearning could tip over into self-pity; I have way too much to merit that. And yet there is a twinge of pain there, the same one I feel when I torment myself with The Family Stone every year, or read Little Women again, et cetera. My family of origin had the potential for that, four children living in a nice house on a pretty street called Rose Lane, but it all blew apart when I was seven and my mother and we kids moved in with my grandparents for three years (when I think of that now, it amazes me how generous they were to open their arms to such an invasion) and then to a step-father and then I was on my own. My mother largely lost her feel for family life when she left my father. All holidays were commercial rackets and suspect. One year she refused to get a Christmas tree and my brother and I walked up to the firehouse and bought one (the stepfather gave us the $) and were dragging it back to the house when he happened along and drove us and the tree back to the house. Notice I don’t say home. His house was never my home. I was a lodger, a bit of baggage that came along with the far younger woman he married.

My grandparents kept up the Thanksgiving tradition and they were as genteel as can be imagined, and I always dressed up, pulling on tights and knee high boots, trying to hide my fat when it suddenly took over my frame. They were kind and mannerly but my mother was too miserable to let a holiday pass without disruption. She was a dish thrower, a stormer outer, a curser. Now I feel desperately sorry for her, but I didn’t then. I wanted that illusion of a big family happy holiday so badly I had no empathy for how trapped and disappointed she felt. She was the adult! I expected her to act like one. Tears, tears, always someone ended up in tears, even before we got to the Floating Island.

My image of a happy family is based on a single afternoon when I was twelve, when we visited the house of friends of my step-father on an island in the sea. I had never seen such a beautiful place, a big house overflowing with beautiful children and their beautiful babysitters (each child had their own), beautiful ocean vistas, beautiful ponies (again, each child had their own), open doors and windows, nature welcomed without fear of mud or grass stains, food out on the kitchen table for the taking, no parents anywhere (I have no idea what the adults did that day), an atmosphere of absolute indivisible joy, zest, mischief, freedom, security. It was quite something for we sad, disrupted children to be dropped into that scene. Yet I had hungered for exactly that and noticed every detail. I was hectic with vindication. I knew such things were possible! I could have tried for it in later life, but I already had it; I had that day. I haven’t written that family yet, but I will, I will. I have been saving it up all this time, until my heart was pure enough to do it justice.

We read The Great Gatsby in my craft class this fall. To my mind it is the most scorching book of all. The sentences burn me, the events are burned into my brain, and the message, the message, the message, we can’t go back and yet we always try to, we are doomed to search for that “fresh green breast of the new world…And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Those first feelings of love and discovery that once surprised us and felt like all of life and how it should be forever, so big and true that they have to be able to exist again, they just have to. That green light at the end of the dock flickers at the corner of our vision. It may look like a tree swing or a house full of children awaiting a feast. But if we ignore its pull, we may find it has become a quiet morning alone with a blank page on which the past may materialize and be reconfigured into an ideal, or a cautionary tale, or a record. We may have become a writer, a person who plays fast and loose with time and imagination, who gets to make up for all that was lost with made up stories. No, it’s not the same, but it is what became of me. If I had become the tradwife, no doubt I’d have wanted this.

When it was dark, I turned toward my home. I saw my cat on her perch spot me coming up the walk. She greeted me at the door, with as many mews and side swiping against as if it were the very first time I’d come back to her. My husband was making pasta for our two-person dinner.

“How was your walk?” he asked.

“Beautiful.”