By the time they sat down to dinner that evening, Rachel had forgiven Bob. The atmosphere was too loaded with anticipation of the long weekend, and of memories of all the days here they’d never have again, to hold on to tiresome resentments. The menu was what it always was for the first dinner: spaghetti, the sauce straight out of a can, bolstered with hamburger and mushrooms, and a salad. That’s what Rachel’s mother had always prepared for the first meal because they always arrived too late for anything fancier. And, for this dinner, like for every first dinner since she died, they left her chair at one end of the long table empty. There’d been no decision to do so; no one in the family had ever said one word about it. They just did.
Rachel and her brother and sister never sat down at that table for the first meal of the stay without reliving, however subliminally, their mother getting up suddenly from her chair and running down the hall, getting to the bathroom just in time. They remembered it as if it had happened every night during their mother’s siege of chemo. Their father would freeze in his chair and then he’d get up and follow her into the bathroom so he could hold her head and the three kids would be the frozen ones now, while they looked in each other’s eyes across the table and heard the sounds of their mother throwing up on the other side of the bathroom door. There must have been something in the shape of that hall that amplified sound, a kind of horn—or maybe the sound no one wanted to hear was the one that was always the loudest.
A few minutes later, their parents would return and take their places as if nothing had happened, and her father would urge his children to eat, trying to keep a sense of normalcy, they understood, even Rachel, the youngest of the three. Her breasts had budded years before, but now where her mother’s soft bosom had been there was only flatness. Soon she’d lie on her back in the dark of her coffin deep under the ground, and so Rachel slept with every light in her room on, and didn’t stop until her freshman year at Smith where her roommate said she could only sleep in the dark.
Rachel’s mother would pretend she’d never left the table and resume the conversation right where it had been interrupted and Rachel still wondered how in the world she could remember. Her father would interrupt her and urge his children to eat again, but he couldn’t eat either. It was a wonder that the whole family didn’t waste away as fast as Rachel’s mother did—while the family dog got fatter and fatter.
Maybe that’s why, all those years later when her ardent husband kissed her breasts in bed that night, Rachel felt a wave of a feeling she couldn’t name—a surprising mixture of fear and disgust. He sensed it right away. He didn’t speak. He turned the light out and she lay down and he pulled the covers up over her and when she started to cry, he put his arms around her. They both sensed she wasn’t crying only for her mother. It was just time for her to cry, that’s all, and so she did. They both knew that people who don’t cry every once in a while haven’t the foggiest idea what’s going on. He held her tight until he fell asleep.
In the morning they awoke to perfect weather, so clear they could see individual people in a sailboat at least a mile out from shore, the color of each person’s hair and what they were wearing. Rachel’s mother had believed such gifts from the god of vacations heralded storms. She’d look up at the sky, observe there were no clouds, and advise her family to have fun on the beach while the sun is still shining “because this one is a weather breeder.” Rachel couldn’t remember her ever being right. And if she was, it didn’t make any difference: rainy days in the cottage were cozy with driftwood burning in the fireplace, Parcheesi and Monopoly. (It wasn’t against the rules to cheat.) And books! Everybody in her family loved to read. They’d sit, engrossed by stories in the living room with its wicker chairs and tongue-and-groove paneled walls and the black-and-white drawings of yachts in harbor, while the rain pattered on the roof and the fire crackled and the wind rattled the shutters.
Their mother had found the drawings in a flea market. Their father would have preferred brand-new pictures to grace the walls of the cottage, but their mother never got used to having whatever she wanted, let alone this capacious, gray-shingled “cottage,” part of Martha’s Vineyard enclave of affluent African Americans. Now their father treasured those pictures. They caught him looking at them again and again, as if he’d never seen them before.
It didn’t rain a drop that weekend, all three days as perfect as the first. No Parcheesi, no Monopoly, they didn’t read a line. They spent the mornings playing doubles on a neighbor’s clay court, four at a time until each had served a game, while the fifth took turns on the sidelines holding Bags’s leash so he wouldn’t chase the balls. The afternoons they spent on the beach. Evenings gin and tonic, dinner, then long talks over too much wine. Rachel and her husband were always the first to go upstairs to bed.
On their last night, already nostalgic, Rachel took a long hot shower to wash the ocean salt away while her naked husband waited for her in bed. Then she put perfume on in the places he liked her to, opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, and took down the little striped purse in which she kept her diaphragm. Last winter, after six years of marriage, they had decided to have a child, but in June she still wasn’t pregnant and then she was suddenly appointed head of school. They made the common-sense decision that she wouldn’t get pregnant until she’d been in office long enough to feel comfortable about taking a maternity leave. But she was thirty-five. Her time was running short. Or was it her mother’s empty chair that made her want to make a child right this minute for herself and a grandchild for her dad?
She opened the purse and took out the case. In her hands its round smoothness felt like some kind of shellfish made in a lab. Inside, the diaphragm looked altogether too much like the rubber dam her dentist used for her root canals. She thought of all the ardent little swimmers that had raced each other toward it, only to crash into it and die like thwarted salmon. She opened the bathroom door and stepped naked into the bedroom. Her husband’s eyes lighted up. She lifted her hand, the round rubber thing held between thumb and forefinger as if it were maybe just a little bit poisonous. “Let’s just see what happens instead,” she said.
He sat bolt upright. “What?”
“Just this once.” She let her hand drop down to her side. His eyes followed. She stood still so he would see her instead, naked, facing him. His eyes moved down from her face and over her body, lingering; his Adam’s apple jumped, his face softened, seeming to melt, as it did when he was aroused. “I’m sick of planning,” she murmured, fervent now, as aroused as he, and turned around to go into the bathroom and put the thing back in the cabinet. She gave a little booty shake to try to make him laugh, and with the door still open so he could see, she put the diaphragm back in its shell, the shell into the striped purse, the purse back into the cabinet. They were going to make love her way, or not at all.
Then she crossed the room to him, lifted the sheet, slid in, and pressing herself against his side, she threw her arm across his chest. “You are too,” she said. “Admit it.”
“I am what?”
“Never mind,” she said, raising herself above him. She lay down on top of him, and aimed her lips for his, but he turned his face. She missed, kissing him on his cheek. He was even more aroused now. That was obvious. She put her tongue in his ear, but he kept his head sideways on the pillow. She was suddenly as furious as she was horny, and she rolled off him onto her side, facing away.
“Oh, Rach!” he said. “A baby right now is the last—”
“Don’t say a word!” she hissed. “Just don’t.”
He was very still. She waited for him to beg her to get up, go back into the bathroom, put the damn thing in, and start all over, but he said nothing and they lay in the dark on their backs not touching, watching a glimmer of moonlight that played on the ceiling, and listening to the distant surf.
THE HONEYSUCKLE SMELL at the front door of the Head’s House, to which she returned on Monday, made Rachel want to cry. The vines ran up a trellis on the front of the Island cottage too, and yesterday all the windows were open and the same sweet, heavy summertime smell was rushing in when she saw her father straightening the pictures of yachts in harbor on the