Bill Clegg: Did You Ever Have A Family

Some of the old-timers around here got worked up when Kelly and Rebecca came in and cleaned up the Moonstone. Even my sister Pam, who sold the place to them, wrinkled her nose. But like most things, what seemed important and wrong on one day could barely be remembered the next. Probably, there will always be wrinkled noses, folks who make jokes about the Moonstone dykes or the little boy on the rez who likes to wear his mom’s earrings, or me, the half-breed, bastard bitch who lives with her sisters. It stops when we die and goes on for those we leave behind. All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company.

June and Lydia will stay here for as long as they need to. I will bring them soup and watch them come back to life, and at night I will lie in the room I grew up in and listen to my sisters open and close doors, flush toilets, and climb the stairs. In the morning I will hear their voices in the kitchen and smell the brewing coffee before I open my eyes.

Rebecca and Kelly will wear the rings I watched them put on their fingers when they said their vows. And together they will get old. The Landises will come back every year. I will make up their rooms and bring them cookies for as long as I can, and when I can’t anymore, they will still come, with children and grandchildren, girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses. They will knock on our door and I will be there, crooked and old, and one day they will knock and I will be gone. And every time they come, they will tell those who don’t know the story of the young man who was a boy here, who went away and came home and went away, who cleaned rooms and carved a canoe and on its prow painted the faces of a family. And the stories will change and the canoe will become a headboard and the family will be mermaids and the rooms will be mansions. And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.

For much more than can be described here, great thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Cathryn Summerhayes, Karen Kosztolnyik, Jennifer Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Wendy Sheanin, Carolyn Reidy, Jennifer Robinson, Michael Selleck, Lisa Litwack, Paula Amendolara, Charlotte Gill, Becky Prager, Chris Clemans, Jillian Buckley, Kassie Evashevski, Martine Bellen, John Gall, Kim Nichols, Sean Clegg, Emma Sweeney, Adam McLaughlin, Cy O’Neal, Jill Bialosky, Susannah Meadows, Stacey D’Erasmo, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Heidi Pitlor, Pat Strachan, Isabel Gillies, Courtney Hodell, Jean Stein, Robin Robertson, Luiz Schwarcz, Kimberly Burns, and to Alan Shapiro for writing a great poem, and Haven Kimmel for singling out the six words that planted the seed all those years ago.

BILL CLEGG is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days . He has written for The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, New York magazine, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar . Visit his website at www.BillCleggAuthor.com.

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