Things we need

“I'd gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That's how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.”
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

I

I’m standing below the under-hang of an outdoor Protestant pavilion on Martha’s Vineyard, in the township of Oak Bluffs, on a thoroughly local holiday called ‘Illumination Night.’ There’s a bowtie-covered band leading a Community Sing in a medley of rousing Americana tunes under a bright yellow moon. No,in case you wondered, Illumination night has no visible mythology or origination tale; it’s just a big, vaguely Christian event devoted to lighting up the old clapboards that surround Oak Bluffs (called ‘gingerbread houses’) with paper Chinese lanterns. The lanterns don't seem to symbolize anything. There was no creation here. It is very beautiful, very idyllic, and almost surreally un-sexy.

I go to Illumination Night with my mom, who sings along with ‘Johnny Comes Marching Home Again’ and ‘My Hat it has Three Corners,’ both ditties she remembers from Girl Scout summers at a one Camp Lachenwald. We go with my sister, my cousin and two aunts. I’m standing in a manicured green oval of a park unpolluted, sickeningly sincere, in a crowd of people bleating their way through ‘America the Beautiful’ without a shred of irony. And here I’m thinking as I stand, my mother egging me to sing with every fiber of her enthusiasm: I am too New York for this. I am too modern a lady. If I was ever from this place, I have grown away.

We pass gingerbread houses with names (real names!) like ‘Just R’s’ and ‘Two Badcats’
and ‘Summertime.’ I begin to get more selfish in my reflections, more interested in the aftermath when I’ll write all the ridiculous down. The aunts want to tour the houses around the Oval, wave to the owners in their rocking chairs basking beneath the assorted glowing globes – I want to go home. So too do my sister and cousin, but they're rational about it because the old houses are enchanting; maybe this night is in fact the stuff of fairy tale. The others play games and giggle while I feel myself spinning into circles of bratdom that only ever seem to appear in me on family vacations, rings of barely concealed temper un-glimpsed for ages: whining, shuffling, pouting. It occurs to me, here on our annual island fun family getaway, that all the world's personalities scarcely change but rather solidify, gel into the corners of acceptable behavior for certain age groups. Your family gets it out of you. We are all of us baby sisters, older sisters, only children, mostly children, emphasis on children.

Now here's the real riddle. How can you know something is so so beautiful and so so temporary and even so, so want to get away?
How can that be?
It is a sad thing, I learn.

II

My grandfather has brought his slides. Everyone FREAK.
My grandfather brings slides to every family gathering. He brings the Carousel slide projector minted in 1970 probably, he brings the accompanying screen. We have all seen all the slides ever made, my family – a century's worth of memory in amateur photo. We've seen the trip to Bruges, the Derby's lake, we've noted the broken bones, the sulks, those conspicuously absent, the inexplicable stranger or forgotten friend, we've seen the Japanese pagodas, the ten kinds of Cadillac, my Grandmother's coats, my Grandmother's hairpieces, Swiss mountain-tops and action ski shots, the whole downtown of a 1977 Wiesbaden, San Francisco stoops, Colorado skylines, clocks in London, and hot air balloons, everyone on different bicycles, very old people in Topeka restaurants, birthday cakes, Easter egg hunts, homemade pies, bodies of water, poor young couples and their fragile Christmas trees, my Aunt Sharon's various ballet tutus, we've seen weddings, we've seen age-arranged and height-arranged and gender-arranged photos year after year, we've seen squealing infants on a hundred (feels like a hundred) different Santa's laps, also snow, also quicksand, all the things a smile or not a smile can contain. We've seen all the lives. We're bored now. We just want to go swimming, or maybe watch Jaws for the fifteenth time instead.

Most of the adults are – testily – still humoring grandpa after all these years, all these shows. This summer the projector's old focus button isn't working, so each photo requires the attendance of a frail and shaky finger to become clear. This annoys my mother. She says so. My older cousin falls asleep, my grandmother tut-tuts in an only semi-related fury, and me? I try not to laugh or sigh, I try to stay quiet. This will be my protest while the auntie's call out their codas of 'Do you remember those pants? I remember those pants!'. My eldest aunt living, not in any of the photos tonight, is the best at this game.

There are supposed to be two shows this week (we caught him loading the projector again on Wednesday) but I think someone got to Grandpa. Someone must have pulled him aside and said, either gently or not so gently (he could deserve either, given all this time, all the different responsibilities loaded into the faces in those photos) that we're not up for it, we've already seen it, we don't want to. I spend some time thinking about how he must have reacted. I spend some time wondering if this broke his heart.

III

'Do not believe everything you think' – One of those cutesy wooden home placards for sale in Vineyard Haven

I read two books on vacation. The sacrifice I make for this task is:
1)Fishing with my brother, father, cousin
2)Learning to Sup-board off the pier with my sister and two girl cousins
3)Going to Edgartown to shop with Grandma and my eldest aunt
4)Going to Vineyard Haven with my mom, my youngest aunt, my cousin, my sister
5)Maddening my sister with a midnight flashlight while she sleeps

I read David Nicholls' One Day and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. I'd been looking for beach-reads, sort of. Both these books are about the impossibility of pure happiness and love's limits, sort of. No day is perfect, no week is perfect, no life is perfect.

My mother explains her Theory of the Children in the car on the way somewhere; we're psychoanalyzing (read:gossiping about) the relatives. She turns to me thoughtfully when I ask her if she always knew how I would turn out and says “I thought so. I was right until you turned thirteen. You went another way.” She pads this remark with love and compassion; she says I am the best possible now, a lovely, radiant thing, she is in awe of me (hehehe). But she also confirms one of my worst fears. I was stronger at some point when I was little, a bossy thing marshaling my young cousins into annual productions and leading the girl pack with not a twinge of neurosis or insecurity (or so it seemed). Now, I am quite neurotic. Now, they call me kind and thoughtful and possessive of a good moral compass. I never said anyone ever called me modest.

But maybe irrationally and certainly with more feeling than I care to explain or reckon with, I want to sob for this little girl swallowed. I am recognizable, mostly (“90% so!” says my mother) but in fractions have peeled, like an orange, like everyone, undoubtedly. Human now? A lady now?
I sacrificed something somewhere thoughtlessly, misplaced it like a book in the rain. It's a secret to me now. Cold aging rationale: 'Oh, well.'

IV

Your life is silly indeed if its central project is to discern itself (an idea lifted from Lorrie Moore). In this way, no love can really be useless. My baby dead cousin is in the air all over this year, her whispered name like the dragonflies in daytime and murmuring mosquitoes at night. Grandma pulls me and my sister aside to tell stories. She tells us about encountering racism in a 'Colored use back door' sign in Topeka. She explains the origination, the creation myth, of our island vacations.
To my sister she says: “I remember asking you, just a young thing, if you thought we should go back to New Hampshire again. You said no, Grandma, not without Lauren.”
My big little sister, usually as unknowable to me as a math equation, starts to cry. My grandma is upset and tries to comfort her. These wounds could be almost sealed up in the sea wind here, but no, no, they linger. My cousin gives my sister advice later in the week about writing a college essay. She tells her merely to be 'thoughtful and honest.' I think about what a fantastic older sister she would have continued to be, and jealously, sickly wonder if she'd be better at it by now than I.

Saturated melancholy, melancholy in technicolor, temporary and too-beautiful, too-precious, too-fragile, an Eden, a life. Standing in a group. Standing in a cluster on the steps. Our laughter carries over the ocean posing for a family picture that my dad keeps messing up by accident. Our tummies become swollen with good food and we continue laughing, the purest kind of laughing, stargazing, playing Whiffle ball, splashing off the dock, birdwatching, calling out ferry names. America crosses my mind (the Obamas are here!) but no, our play feels sincere and specific. I read The New York Times cover to cover and drink my aunt's famous lattes. I strut around in summer dresses but do not brush my hair.
We are free.

Too free? Should I even dare? I feel like I'm refusing a present. I feel like I'm clinging to what's become a familiar cynic's pose. I feel entirely myself and entirely not myself in the suspended disbelief and age and memory of my sprawling, nutty family. I recall what it feels like to stand on steps inside other families – my family that yells and curses and drinks and smokes, for instance, my family that keeps no secrets in language. Younger but not less wise, more breakable. Everywhere I look I'm sacrificing something.

Saying goodbye is hard. It has gotten harder and harder as it's grown more frequent. I ache for my silly, sweet pets with their painted genetic smiles. I ache for a feeling I know I won't ever have again – bored, too comfortable on a summer Saturday, endless movies with my family, no end in sight. My sister and brother have mentioned in passing that they feel they know each-other better than they know me because we “just didn't live together that long” (twelve years I spent dashing from friends' houses to rehearsal, it appears) and I ache for those ending childhoods I've missed. I do not want the guilt inherent to my apartment (which I show my parents, more pleased than they are, when they drop me off), so, today, I feel no relief. My heart whirs because it's homeless.

Mostly I wish for a long, long talk with my mother that ends in her understanding me enough to say it all back in sweet English, I need a sounding board strong enough to answer all the rhetoricals I'll ever need to send into space. It's not that it's not family. It's not being alone or being with others. It's not being anywhere or being nowhere. It is double negatives. I believe in happiness, bliss, love, worthy endings, maybe I even believe that death isn't such a tragedy and there could be a world beyond imagination, I believe in all these things. I've known it all in a present life, on a recent week.

Creation myths and comedies, firework finales to make your head spin and your eyes leak, sticky patches, lonesomeness and entire-ness, it doesn't END, it just gets MESSY... If I were more of an optimist (more of a twelve year old?) I'd take me by my shoulders. I'd shake me, gently clear away my tears and quiet my mind, I'd dance with me to a disco song and cure me of migraines and upset stomach forever, I'd show me the future on a golden dream's reel, I'd tell me it's over, get a new show, I'd lead me to a bug-less meadow, sit me down, tell me straight, tell me now – NOW – the Great Work Begins.

(Because vacations end.)