A Likely Story

Sunday, April 10th

Another expense. Ginger and I just came back from Fire Island, where we looked at rental houses. The train from Penn Station got us to Bay Shore in time for the 1:00 ferry over to Fair Harbor on Fire Island, where we had about an hour and a half to look at houses and to walk in the thin sunlight on the cold tan beach, hand in hand, smiling foolishly, before taking the 3:10 ferry off again. It was nice to be out there, nice to see the early spring flowers and smell the salt air with its promise of summer, nice to stop thinking about Christmas (and that awful woman!) for just a little while.

Summer house rentals are outrageous; they always have been, and they get worse every year. We saw at once that we wouldn’t be able to afford August, the more expensive month, so we resigned ourselves to the second-class existence of being July renters. (And even that can only be afforded if Vickie Douglas and her superiors at Craig, Harry & Bourke agree on June first that five of my contributors are sufficiently today and famous to activate the next stage of the contract. With Capote and Galbraith already having been dismissed, who knows what names would impress that awful woman?)

One of the complications in our rental search is that we need a very large house, since we will have all four kids with us — Ginger’s two and my two — and to be able to afford the full month of July we have to give accommodation to Mary for two weeks within it.

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place! When Mary first suggested this insane idea, I quite naturally said no, no, a thousand times no and assumed that was the end of it. But it was not. The discussion took place in Mary’s kitchen, over cups of coffee, a couple of Sundays ago, after I brought the kids back from their weekend romp with Papa. Jennifer and Bryan had gone away to the living room to watch Sixty Minutes, leaving me at Mary’s mercy, and we spent a while looking at contact prints of a series of pictures she’d done for some goody-goody youth magazine. They showed a young girl (Jennifer) making a birdhouse; sawing, nailing, painting, etc. In every photo, Jennifer wore the identical solemn and rigid expression, which seemed to me wrong. I said, “She doesn’t look like she’s making a birdhouse, she looks like she’s posing for pictures.”

“It’s very hard to break through that self-consciousness.” Mary sighed, tapping a fingernail on perhaps the worst of the batch: Jennifer, solemn, looked unemotionally at a hammer she held perched atop a nail partway stuck into a board. “I don’t want to send these in if they’re not right,” Mary said. “It’s a new market for me, I don’t want to screw it up.”

I could only agree with that sentiment. Mary’s occasional photography sales, and her more frequent research jobs, were in truth a mere drop in the bucket of my financial responsibilities, but every drop helps. I said, “Why not have Jennifer build a birdhouse, and take pictures while she’s doing it?”

Smiling ruefully, Mary said, “Well, she’s not very good at it, is the problem. I hate to say such a thing, but she hammers like a girl.”

There are these moments in life, when reality gets in the way of our best intentions. “Hmm,” I said.

“And the pictures come out confused anyway,” she went on. “I really have to do posed shots, because the whole point is to show other kids how it’s done.”

“And inspire them,” I suggested, “with pictures of a girl who can.”

“Yes.” She frowned at the prints. “Maybe if she held the hammer up in the air, it would be better.”

“If she could manage to look at the nail as though she wanted to hit it,” I said, “that might also help.”

“We’d better shoot another series,” she decided, pushed the contact pages to one side, and looked at me with deceptive calmness as she said, “Do you know what you’re going to do this summer?”

“We’ll try to rent a house for a month out on Fire Island,” I said. “Take all the kids out there.”

“Which month?”

“I don’t know yet. Depends on rental prices, what we can find. Ginger can shuffle her vacation schedule around, so we have some flexibility.”

“I’ll want to know pretty soon,” she said, “so I can make arrangements for the other month and tell you how much money I’ll need.”

I looked at her. “Money?”

“Well, I’ll have to take the children somewhere, too.”

Two months of summer rental? “I can’t afford that, Mary,” I said. (Last year, they’d stayed a month up in Greene County with another separated mommy and her kids, old friends of ours.)

She smiled, shaking her head at me; clearly, I just didn’t understand the situation. “We’re your family, Tom,” she said. “You don’t say you can’t afford your family.”

“I do say it. Besides, I’ll be taking Jennifer and Bryan for a month.”

“Vacation is two months.”

“Mary, that’s all I can handle.”

“You expect me, Tom, to stay in the city the entire summer?”

Oh, hell. “Mary,” I said, “what am I supposed to do?”

“You know what you’re supposed to do.”

Well, we wrangled for a while, and then she said, “Why not take a place for the whole season? Then you and Ginger could have it half the time, and the children and I could have it the rest.”

“I told you, I can’t afford it. I can barely afford the one month.”

“Then we’ll divide that in half,” she said. “Two weeks for you and two weeks for me.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no, you don’t.”

“I tell you what, Tom,” she said, with that infuriating smile. “I’ll let you stay out there during my two weeks if you want. And Ginger, of course, and the children.”

“No,” I said. “No, no, a thousand times no.”

She shrugged, unruffled. “Well, you’ll have to think of something,” she said.

So I spent time thinking about her ideas. She knew I wouldn’t be able to just walk away from my goddam responsibility — why, oh, why won’t she get a fella? — so it came down to one of two choices: Either I come up with the money for Mary to take her own month in the sun (which I very grudgingly acknowledge she should get, if I’m getting such a month), or Ginger and I share two weeks of our summer vacation with her.

If I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t have any problems, right? Or, at least not these problems. I tossed and turned and wriggled and squirmed on the end of that harpoon for several days before first broaching the subject to Ginger, who stared at me as though I had just dyed my hair green. She said, “Are you crazy?”

“I can’t afford to give her a month, Ginger. And it’s only two weeks.”

“Only!”

“Think of her as a kind of built-in babysitter,” I said. “Freeing us for—”

“A mother’s helper.” Ginger’s voice dripped with scorn.

“In a way,” I said.

“No,” Ginger said. “No, no, a thousand times no.”

“That’s what I said when Mary first suggested it.”

“Oh, that bitch!” Ginger said. “That devious conniving bitch!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s so devious? Everything’s right out on the surface. Ginger, you can’t deny the woman deserves a—”

“Deserves! What about me?”

“We’re having a month!” I yelled, getting mad. “She’s getting two lousy weeks!”

“And they will be lousy, you can bet on that!”

“Not for us, Ginger,” I said. “I promise. We can live our own life, have nothing to do with Mary at all.”

“Living in the same house.”

“We’ll find the right house,” I said. “Something with a separate entrance or something. Besides, think of it this way. If Mary sees us together for a couple of weeks, sees how wonderfully we get along together—”

“Hah.”

“So we’ll get along, dammit! Do you have to be so goddam selfish all the time? Can’t you see—”

“Selfish! Am I forcing myself onto somebody else’s—”

It went on like that for a while, although louder. Ginger threw a book and an ashtray and a copy of New York magazine, but not at me. Then she abruptly stormed out of the room, slammed the bedroom door behind her, and wouldn’t speak to me for two days; so that’s how I knew I’d won the fight.

A new variant on the Pyrrhic victory. After arguments and rages and trouble with two women, I have at last achieved a goal I don’t want. Don’t ask me how such things happen, they just do. I am not looking forward to sharing a house with Ginger and Mary for two minutes, let alone two weeks, but there it is.

After the real-estate lady showed us several formica-and-linoleum chalets — places designed so they can be hosed down after the filthy renters depart — we finally found on Laurel Walk a place peculiarly suited to our peculiar needs. An older house, clapboard outside and homosote within, it has two bedrooms and a bath downstairs and one bedroom with its own tiny bath as a later addition upstairs. Out back, across the wooden deck, is a small guesthouse, complete with its own bath. That’s where we put Mary, and the kids go in the downstairs bedrooms, and Ginger and I will be able to retire to peace and privacy all alone upstairs. My hand trembled slightly as I signed the deposit check, but within the range of options open to me I think I made the right decision.

So why do I feel so nervous?