1990

There was no inkling of anything but the ordinary as Claire made a last survey of the narrow townhouse, searching for things that might belong to either daughter. On the top storey of the house she crossed old floorboards and appeared briefly in an oak-framed mirror, middle-aged but in the professional manner, short hair made blond again, brown eyes with the faintest liner. There was still a waistline and she moved with the expectation that something remained of her sexual life; here was a woman pleased with what lay around her. Reaching the hallway, she took the steep stairs with experienced thighs and ignored the third floor, where the girls would check their own rooms, one exquisitely cluttered and the other a spartan barrack. On the second floor she glanced toward the front room where light from the big windows lay comfortably on the pale patterns of a Chinese rug: Was there a misplaced book, some tapes, perhaps a scarf? Nothing nor in the dim family room behind it, a sweet room over the garden with worn peach-colored carpet that maybe after they’d repaid the college loans they could replace.

Family room, it was called, yet they’d spent most of their time on the first floor. The stairs leveled out beside a formal dining room with its chandelier missing a bulb – mine is a used more than an empty nest, Claire assured herself. The real family room was back here in the kitchen. Everything had happened in this large honey-colored room. Beside the fireplace, in front of the modern galley, among the four high stools, the sagging couch, and the two old bentwood rockers, this is where they’d raised the girls. What a lovely room, too, strewn with magazines and flowerpots—and there she was, the second-born, their June graduate who was leaving today. Bess.

She wore her hair, or part of it, in a ponytail, which she was busy detaching from a buckle of her utilitarian backpack, and then she was walking slowly across the floor to the fireplace. She was saying good-bye, Claire realized, to all her familiars – the old iron fireplace tools, the hanging baskets of Star of Bethlehem, the photograph on the mantel where the four of them sat permanently intertwined, the girls still small. In the picture time stops and every family member touches another, some two: an arm around a shoulder, a hand upon a knee, linked elbows, one animal in four parts, that’s a family, or temporarily. Bess turned to Clair and said, “Guess I’ve got it all.” This was not the daughter Claire had worried much about.

They headed out of the kitchen together, though Claire stopped and went back to return the butter to the refrigerator: It’s going to be hot today. Later on, it would be that pause she’d remember, banal and ordinary, as if in turning back she’d somehow veered off course into the wrong future. Because that’s where she was when Phoebe came running in to pour a last cup of tea into a travel mug. The firstborn had her father’s red hair and an energy that made the kitchen hum. Claire had had that energy once, still did, inside, somewhere. She’d learned to push it down and quell it because a mother must move forward effectively, quietly pacifying whatever jumps and jerks or threatens to fall apart. Phoebe doesn’t know that yet, Claire told herself, adding with a touch of rue: She’ll find out. The firstborn and her father had long ago been so close that Claire had found it necessary to teach herself not to mind. She’ll find out what a mother must think without alarm of yet another leaking thermos or a teacher’s report that reads, “immature for five.” Claire smiled at that. She herself was definitely immature for fifty, far too young for any years called Golden.

“Phoebe!” she called after the light-footed girl and gathered up a paperback of Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi from the top of the refrigerator with “Phoebe Fairchild” written dashingly across the title page. She felt the years roll off her: There’s nothing to worry about They’re fine, the girls, off to New York together, fine. Even though Phoebe doesn’t seem too thrilled at carting Bess into her life and even though Bess has always followed after that red-haired firecracker who seldom looked her way. They’re grown up now. Stay calm a couple minutes more and the number of items animate and inanimate for which you’ve been responsible for a quarter of a century will reduce. Your old self will bubble up. Call it the Yellow Years, shine on.

Outside, a wiry man with surprisingly white hair waited by a car. Harvey had already loaded Bess’s enormous carpetbag into the trunk, as well as her stereo and tapes, which were packed in a very heavy box with recently devised – he’d made them himself – rope handles and wheels. He liked to take care of his daughters. This was not the way he’d left home for Korea, except for maybe the sharpness of the morning light. He’d carried a fifty-pound duffel bag to the bus station because his father had taken the car to get to his job on the late shift. Only his mother had stood by the door to wave and he’d had to lug the duffel manfully without limping or leaning until he got around the first corner and out of her sight where life could begin. Now it was his turn to be left behind.

Bess came out of the house and stood unmoving, looking up and down the cobbled sidewalk. What was she doing? He watched her take a step, her movements considered, unerringly right, like her mother’s. His own were quick, sometimes too fast, sometimes a beat behind.

“Lots of room!” he called out to Bess and indicated the open trunk. She shrugged as she stepped into the street. Maybe a little scared, he told himself. She was the kind that hung back at first, played guard instead of forward, looked things over. The firstborn was more like himself, center forward or wing, plunge in and see.

Phoebe ran out of the house toward the car, her carroty hair crinkled by one of those processes known to women that gave it a rippling effect like something out of Botticelli, if he had the painter right. He’d had that color hair once, too, boy’s version. And Phoebe had the same blue eyes he saw in the mirror every morning and once or twice a year in the face of his aging mother, where they no longer conferred the light of understanding. Phoebe handed him a shabby fringed shoulder bag for the trunk and he felt that great mystery, that biological pull toward what’s genetically familiar –his girl.

Claire came out of the house last, turned, and stood back to the car as she locked up the house. He admired her serenity—his wife did not fluster. He looked at his watch. They were on time. He shut the trunk, walked around to the driver’s door, and lowered himself into the seat.

“We’re hitting bottom, Daddy,” Bess said in her full, satisfying voice behind him. It was an old family joke from their days at the lake when, in the boat, he’d mistaken the branches of a moldering tree beneath them for the shoreline.

“Next stop, life,” he replied, easing off the cobblestones and heading toward Rittenhouse Square.

“God, Daddy, relax!” Phoebe said in her breathier, anxious voice.

Did he appear tense?

Claire, moving in to handle the moment, said, “Okay, your new housemates are two guys from Yale…”

“Daryl and Ibrahim,” Phoebe replied with a hairline mix of politeness and impatience. “Plus Nora, who’s brilliant. She graduated fourth in her college.”

At Yale ’88, not bad.

“You watch out for those two guys, Bess,” Harvey said, hearing too late the 1950’s leer in his voice. Silly, outdated. And it wasn’t simple the sexual difference between his and his children’s generation to watch out for, there was also the sister stuff. Boys had been falling over Bess since she reached eighth grade. Not Phoebe, who could be testy and selfish, who stood for her own rights before anybody else’s. He’d taught her that. If she’d been a boy, it would have worked out fine.

Bess was going on correctively about today’s men and women in her droll,, throaty hum. “Now, what was it you guys called it, Dad? ‘Dating?’ No dating with housemates nowadays, remember?”

Harvey crossed Market to JFK and onto the elevated boulevard that spanned the Schuylkill to the white-columned railroad station on Thirtieth Street, where he pulled into a parking space. Inside the great marble expanse, they walked side by side, the parents in the middle with Harvey pushing the stereo and balancing the carpetbag. Beside him, Phoebe twisted an ankle above her fairly gala shoes and flung out a hand toward her father’s arm, balanced herself, continued on. Claire adapted her pace to Bess’s so that halfway across the station those two were walking just a bit behind the other two. Strangers might have noticed in the striated light of the cathedral space how alike Claire and Bess were in movement, how alike Harvey and Phoebe. There are variations of these alignments in all families, even, sometimes, when children are adopted, but such simplifications can be misleading. A happy family, one might judge; why isn’t mine like that? Another would hazard only that this was a family that had not known tragedy.