Did You Ever Have A Family

Dale

There is always one who goes away. This is what Mimi first said when Will sat us down his junior year in high school to tell us he wanted to go to college on the East Coast. His sister went to Reed, which felt like a world away, and his brother went to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Both were within driving distance of Moclips, where we lived and raised our family: one north, one south. It was selfish of us, but we’d hoped Will would do the same. Don’t get me wrong: we wanted them to go where they wanted to go, but our kids have been our life for the last two decades — we’ve been a team — and the change is hard. Both Mimi and I are only children and had parents who died young, so our kids are it. Maybe we just got lucky. Our kids were always great, better company even in their teens than most adults we know. Maybe it sounds unhealthy, or codependent, but it’s true. Will’s sister, Pru, took an interest in gardening when she was nine and inspired all of us to start seeding vegetables and herbs in the winter to plant in the spring. She organized a system of mulching that Mimi and I still follow to the letter today. By the time Pru left for college every one of us could have showed up on an organic farm anywhere ready to go to work. And Mike, Will’s older brother, he’s been turning us on to all kinds of new music since he was in the third grade. Through Mike we started listening to indie singer-songwriters like Ray LaMontagne and Cat Power. Through Mike we first heard Moby and then later Phoenix and Daft Punk. He also introduced us to the music of our own generation, which we for the most part missed: Sex Pistols, Kate Bush, Joy Division, Blondie. Lately he’s fixated on eighties metal bands like AC/DC and Def Leppard, and that’s where we part ways. And Will, he was more alert to what was happening politically and socially in the world than any of us. From an early age he was committed to the environment, the homeless. Later, he became obsessed with Rachel Corrie, the activist from Olympia who was killed by an IDF bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes. He followed every beat of that story: after she was killed the censorship in New York of the play based on her writings, the stonewalling of the US Congress to block an investigation into her death. Will was fourteen and writing letters to our congressman, letters of support to the Corrie family, insisting our whole family attend the rallies and memorials in her honor. He was a committed kid. He marched, he sat in, he sang, he organized. And we joined him. Neither Mimi nor I had ever been terribly political, but with Will he just brought these issues to life, and his sense of urgency and injustice and responsibility was infectious. His brother and sister teased him a little, but before they left for college, and even after, they showed up to nearly everything he asked them to. They were even arrested with Will when they chained themselves to a homeless shelter in Olympia that was scheduled for demolition due to budget cuts and a plan to develop the land where it stood. Mimi and I got the call from Mike, and we dropped everything right away to bail them out. We were not angry with them or disappointed. Just the opposite. The three of them chained to each other in support of something they believed in was evidence to us that, as parents, we’d done something right.

So when Will told us he wanted to go to Amherst College, we were speechless. Tucked away in the hills of Massachusetts, the school might as well have been on Mars as far as we were concerned. Still, Will broke it to us sweetly, and the three of us cried and decided to call his sister and brother together to give them the news. It was the last year we lived in the house in Moclips. When Will left for college, we sold it to a couple who taught at the college in Aberdeen. They were newly married and planning a family, and what better fit could we have found. As teachers ourselves, elementary school, not college, we thought it was a good omen. We had bought the place from a widow who had never had children with her husband, but from what we gathered over the years, they’d been a tight pair, good people. We would still see her all the time, walking the road between the Moonstone where she worked and her sister’s place, but Cissy was never much for small talk. We thought she was on the rude side of things when we first met her. We imagined that maybe she was holding a grudge against the young family who barged into her home and took over, but once we got to know Cissy, we began to understand that this was just her way. She didn’t have a lot to say. After we moved in, she still came around, flipped the fuse switch when the power blew, jiggled the toilet just so when it wouldn’t flush, even would bring overflow of firewood and kindling from her place to our porch in the winters. The one time I tried to pay her for cleaning the gutters she turned her back to me and walked away.

As a kid, Will was mesmerized by Cissy. It’s understandable: she was over six feet tall and had a long, black braid with silver streaks the size of an anaconda. For a little guy she was an absolute giant. The summer we moved in, Will offered to help her clean the rooms at the Moonstone, and she said sure. He’d asked our permission and we just expected she’d say no, but when he came back from across the road and said he’d be back in a few hours, we couldn’t go back on our word.

She paid him a buck each day. He was ten years old, scrubbing toilets and making beds and hauling garbage. Of course he soon began to give us cleaning lessons. Among other things, he showed us the secret to creasing hospital corners when making a bed and how to fold and hang towels properly. We’d ask him what he and Cissy talked about. Oh, nothing, he’d say. Cissy doesn’t talk. Funny that a restless kid like Will never got impatient with that silence of hers. He was precocious, a talkative boy full of questions and opinions. To be honest, it’s impossible to imagine the two of them in the Moonstone rooms — him emptying wastepaper baskets and putting new rolls of toilet paper in the dispensers and Cissy scrubbing the tubs and vacuuming. But the two were quite a pair, and it lasted on and off until the summer Will turned thirteen, when he began to become interested in the Quinault, the Native American tribe that had an active and large reservation up the beach. After that summer, he spent most of his time getting involved in any way he could on the reservation. He did anything they asked. He scraped and painted garages, the canoe sheds, their houses. A guy there named Joe Chenois, an elder, took a shine to Will and told him he’d spend one hour teaching him canoe carving for every week he worked on the reservation. Joe led Will to be interested in the law. Joe had been instrumental in the eighties in leading the fight to reclaim thousands of acres of Quinault land. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was an organizer and an activist, a leader, and he became expert in Native American laws, and the Constitution as it pertained to tribal sovereignty. Joe was Will’s hero, and when he died of lung cancer in the fall of Will’s freshman year in college, Will flew back to Seattle and drove down the coast to the memorial. We’d sold the house by then and it was the first time Will would stay at the Moonstone as a guest. Moonstone Beach, Moclips, and the history of the area was always more important to Will than it was to the rest of us. He’d read books on the massacres and the government land steals and tell us the stories with tears in his eyes. On the reservation they called him Little Cedar, a name Joe gave him the year Will carved his first and only canoe.

Lolly Reid was not the kind of girl we expected Will to fall for. We always thought he’d team up with the kind of girls he dated in high school. Outdoorsy, political girls. Earnest girls who were often pretty but unpolished. As disorganized and flighty as Lolly could be, she was polished. More beautiful than pretty. She had long blond hair and was stylish in a New York City kind of way. She read books but not about Indian massacres or fracking in the Catskills. She read novels, modern ones about families and secrets and love. She spoke French and Italian and knew a lot about contemporary art from her mother, who ran galleries in New York and London. After college, Lolly worked in the photo department of a fashion magazine in New York. She was sophisticated culturally but not politically and was the kind of girl who, we thought, was invisible to Will. They met on a study-abroad program in Mexico sponsored by Vassar the spring semester of their junior year. Will went to Mexico because he was fascinated by the government’s stewardship of the Mayan tribal culture, and he also wanted to refine his Spanish so that he could be a bilingual public defender. Lolly, on the other hand, decided at the last minute to follow her previous boyfriend into the program, but broke up with him a few days after they arrived, after she met our son. She explained this to us the night we met her, at a small restaurant she and Will liked to go to near their campus in Mexico City.

Who knows what draws people together? Lolly seemed unformed to us. Young. She was colorful and chatty, full of stories, but had few questions. She drew you in, but once you were there, you sensed she could vanish without warning. She had a way of telling two stories at once, looking behind you when she spoke. She seemed like someone who covered her bases, kept several balls in the air so she always knew she would have at least one in hand at the end of the day. She was clever, but not careful. She was, we recognized immediately, someone who could hurt our son. Around Lolly he was fatherly, patient, mesmerized. We watched him sweep up tortilla crumbs that had fallen down and around the table in front of her during the meal. He did this not once but three times, and as he did, she continued to talk, animate what she was saying with expressive eyes, passionate tones, and wild hand gestures, all the while absentmindedly spilling crumbs as she took bites of her food between words. Five months after that dinner, from the Moonstone in Moclips, he called to tell us he had proposed.

Lolly was the new Cissy, the new Joe Chenois, the new cause, the new Amherst. She was somewhere Mimi and Pru and Mike and I had not been and could not go. Will always had that knack for frontiers, even if they were in our own backyard. But marrying Lolly felt different, risky and final at the same time.

They both still had their senior years to finish and I’m ashamed to admit that Mimi and I hoped the distance between Amherst and Vassar would be far enough to make their engagement seem like a summer folly. It is true we never got to know her well. Pru spent a week with her before the wedding. She asked Will if it would be okay. She’d only met Lolly twice before, and she said she just wanted to be with them, help in whatever way she could. Pru called us each of those days before we flew East for the wedding. She said she was beginning to understand Will’s connection with Lolly. Twice we patched Mike in on these phone calls. It was like we’d sent an explorer to the new world and we hung on every word she used to describe what she saw and heard and how she felt. She described the old stone farmhouse where June and her boyfriend lived, the wide fields behind the house and the acres of trails on the Unification Church land, which their property bordered. She described everyone: June’s boyfriend, Luke, who was much younger and, she said, beautiful. His mother, Lydia, who was hard to get to know, a bit standoffish but not in an arrogant way, more like a hurt animal would be. And June, who she said reminded her of Will: strong, competent, organized, but, like Will, a little undone around Lolly, deferential, in awe.

I remember the last call Pru made from that house. It was the night before we flew East. She would be joining us at the Betsy Motel once we arrived. Lolly’s father was arriving in the morning, she told us, and there had been a fuss about where he was staying. Lolly had insisted he sleep at the house with them, and June, that afternoon, asked her to reconsider. It led to a big fight and Lolly of course won. But before it was over, it got heated and Pru went for a walk to clear her head and get a little distance from the tension. Later, on the way back to the house, she said she found June sitting on a fallen tree in the woods with her arms holding her sides, gently rocking. Pru didn’t want to alarm her but it was too late to walk away. When June saw her, she waved her over and wiped the tears from her face. Pru asked if she was okay, and June answered with a question that seemed to Pru more of a comment on June’s struggles with Lolly: Did you ever have a family? Pru said she sounded completely wiped out, at wit’s end. She asked June if she wanted to walk back with her to the house, but she politely declined, saying she needed to be alone a little while longer.

Pru told us that night that she’d never felt as grateful. That her answer to June’s question had been yes, but not as a commiseration, or an explanation of fatigue, as it seemed to be for June, but both as an acknowledgment of great fortune and a prayer of thanks. With Mike on the line from Tacoma, and Mimi and I huddled over her iPhone on speaker in the kitchen, Pru whispered to us, Thank you.