There is not really a dusk in New York City; not one like this, anyways. I tend to hate idyllic stories of country life and landscape paintings and nature hikes, but it actually feels like my heart can slow down sitting here, in a white iron-wrought beach chair with mosquitoes just beginning to swarm, as my relatives play croquet (cousin Chris strums guitar) and the ocean laps laps laps like…like nothing, really. There’s not a perfect simile for peace.
It’s nice to see people smiling. It’s nice to see them free. That’s the thing about families, allegedly: we are supposed to be our most candid in the circles where we don’t expect judgment or fear dislike. It’s a hotbed of neuroses and faces without make-up and nudity with abandon crammed into this island house: we sit and kind of simmer in our most grotesque humanity as the world moves by slowly around us, it meanders, rather than marches or clicks or stomps impatiently, demanding things of us. It’s almost strange having nothing to do—I for one have to look for ways to keep my hands and my mind busy. My mind will wander to very dark places indeed, left to its own devices.
In an old secondhand bookstore halfway between our house and Vineyard Haven I crouch uncomfortably in the biography section looking at the diaries of Anais Nin. I know nothing about her but her face is so easy to remember on the jacket: heavily made-up eyes that don’t look directly at anything I can see, the way they sit kind of sadly in her face. I buy a stack of plays (I’m supposed to love reading plays, as an actress, but I’m twinging with guilt as I reluctantly fork over my first twenty for a stack of August Strindberg that honestly just looks super-dooper boring). I wheeze biking home; this is embarrassing. There’s a roll of fat around my middle nowadays that I swear wasn’t always there, that I swear comes and goes according to my self-esteem. Today it rages and wiggles like a giant spoonful of chocolate pudding, I mean if you look at it up close and study it like only a teenage girl or a precocious, observant little kid could. Things like this drift in and out of my mind, slow travel of cumulus clouds and lines of poetry I love and the sensation of toothpaste swilling in my mouth before I spit it back into the porcelain basin I share with my sister and two cousins: it leaves a trace, though. Everything leaves a trace.
My grandmother gets up ten minutes before the last person has finished eating dinner like clockwork every evening, tottering towards the kitchen where she begins a slow and steady and scrutinizing scour of all the kitchen surfaces. She moves with strain and caution, having been the harbor for a vicious case of advancing rheumatory arthritis for the past twenty-five years of her life, but the twitch of pain I think I see in her face as she lurches away from the edge of the table (where she perches and does not sit, does not ever fully relax…) just makes me mad these days. I wonder why she feels this is her cross to bear, why she shoulders this burden of cleaning up after a massive dinner for fifteen when every other willing adult in the room has offered at some point to help. I’m tempted to write this off as yet another thing I do not understand, could not understand, about being a mother, but people treat this daily exercise like we are humoring her and she soldiers forward like it’s expected. Is this a cycle? I pause to think through a mouthful of something, anything (we eat well here) and there’s that shaving nick again: I am overanalyzing. Looking too deep into the fibers of what is supposed to be a really happy carefree vacation, noticing. People use the term ‘dysfunctional’ often enough when describing these entities, these knots of folks, but the more I think about it in this iron wrought chair overlooking the ocean I think there couldn’t be a worse term: we function, alright. We are perfunctory, mechanical, we operate, we cover-up: only our gears are sticky, our employees unenthusiastic, our product questionable. We are churning away with the reliability of the ocean waves year after year at our island escape, generation after generation of pain covered up for this single week of acknowledged family bliss, we are operating and doing and being everything we are supposed to be and then some, because we are puzzle pieces either forced or destined to fit together somehow…I guess I just wouldn’t buy what we’re making, if I were…shopping for it. There’s no real freedom in people, I don’t think. It’s always a little darker inside a house than it is outside.
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