Lily King: Father of the Rain

We stop at the Howard Johnson’s for lunch. I like their fried clams because they’re just the necks, no bellies. The bellies make me throw up. But there is a mountain of them. They look like fat fried worms. I eat three. My mother can’t eat much of her club sandwich either. The waitress asks if we’d like to take the food home with us, and we both shake our heads no.

“We are going to be okay, you and I,” my mother says, rubbing my arm.

“I know,” I say, and my mother looks relieved.

Back in the car, she lets me put in an eight-track for a little while. I play John Denver singing about his grandma’s feather bed. I play it over and over until she asks me to stop. It makes me happy, that song, all the kids and the dogs and the piggy in the bed together.

We cross into New Hampshire. Until she got married when she was nineteen, my mother spent every summer of her life on Lake Chigham. She says I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember it. I can only remember my grandparents in our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, sitting in chairs. I have no memory of them standing up.

After a while we get off the highway onto narrow then narrower roads. The trees seem to get taller. We turn onto a dirt road with a small white sign with blue paint: CHIGHAM POINT ROAD. Below it, in much smaller letters: Private Way .

My mother sucks in a deep breath and says, letting it out, “Here we go.”

I look down the road. There are no houses, just trees — pines and maples — blocking out every drop of sun.

“Remember it now?” my mother asks.

“No.”

We drive in. It’s a very long road with other roads leading off it, long driveways with last names painted on wooden boards nailed to trees. Occasionally, through all the trees and bushes and undergrowth, you can see the dark shape of a house or the glint of water. We turn down one of the last driveways and park beside a brown sedan. The house, made of dark brown wood, is only a few feet from the lake, which is still and too bright to look at after the dark road.

“Home again, home again,” she says in a sigh.

My grandfather comes out. His mouth is all bunched up like he’s angry and he moves quickly down the porch steps and my mother practically runs to meet him and they hug hard. My mother lets out a noise and Grindy says, “Shhhh, shhhhh now,” and strokes her hair until the kerchief falls on the grass. She says something quietly and he says, “I know. I know you did. Twenty-three years is enough trying.”

He motions to me with an arm and when I get close enough he pulls me into their hug and kisses me on the forehead.

Nonnie is in the doorway when we come in with all our bags. She kisses us both on the cheek. Her skin is fuzzy and she smells like one of those tiny pillows you put in your drawer to scent your clothes. She isn’t really my grandmother, my mother tells me that night, when we are lying in our twin beds in the room we share. I have never known this. It turns out I’ve never met my real grandmother. She lives in Arizona, and my mother hasn’t seen her since Garvey was a baby.

Nonnie still has a young face but old hair, completely white. She keeps it pinned up, but if you go down into the kitchen early enough you can catch her in a blue plaid robe and her hair, brushed to a shine, spilling down past her waist. The rest of the day it’s gone, braided and coiled behind her head.

At dinner that night, Grindy argues with my mother about Nixon. “All these testimonies and hearings are just putting a stopper on everything else. These ridiculous tapes! The country doesn’t need to listen to all that nonsense. We are in a serious recession. Let the man deal with things that matter.”

“Nothing matters more than this, Da. People need to be held accountable. Otherwise we’re paving the way for another Hitler.”

Grindy shakes his head. “Little girl,” he says, and then his voice grows very sharp. “You mustn’t ever speak of Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler in the same breath. Ever. Richard Nixon did not know about Watergate.” My mother tries to interrupt but he holds up his hand. “He did not know about it, and all he is guilty of is trying to protect his own men from going to prison. You are naive, little girl. There is always internal spying. Always . These people got caught. But the president needs to be able to get back to the business of running the country.”

My mother looks like she’s looking at my father. Nonnie asks if anyone would like more beans.

After dinner my grandfather watches the Red Sox. I stand behind his chair and polish his bald head with my sleeve. I’m fascinated by the sheen of his scalp, the white age spots, the brown age spots. My mother tells me to leave him alone but he tells her it feels nice. The thin layer of brown shiny skin smells like mushrooms before they’re cooked. When I go to bed, he puts his hands over my ears and gives me a hard kiss of bristles on my forehead.

My mother insists that my father knows where we are, but I can’t understand why he hasn’t called or driven up. I pick up the phone every now and then, to see if it really does work, then hang it back up. He must be so mad at me.

On the map of the lakes region in my grandparents’ dining room, where we are is circled in red. Our point looks like a little tonsil hanging off the north side of the lake.

“It’s like being in a bunker,” my mother says to someone on the phone, probably her friend Sylvie. “No light comes in the windows. You have to go out into the middle of the lake to see the sun.”

In the upstairs hallway there is a photograph of my mother standing on the dock in a white two-piece bathing suit, scratching her leg. Her skin is brown against the white and she is smiling. In the background a few girlfriends are waiting for her in the water. Those friends still come back here, with their own families, and my mother wonders aloud to me in our slope-ceilinged room how they can do it, return each summer, year after year, to the same people, the same cocktail parties, the Fourth of July picnic, the August square dance, the endless memorial services for all the old people who died over the winter.

Eventually my mother drags over a girl named Gail to meet me. She’s going into sixth grade too, but looks much older. I take her up to my room to show her my albums.

“You’re tiny,” she says, wrapping her fingers around my wrist. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and we smoke a few on the third floor next to an old seamstress’s mannequin. The taste reminds me of kissing Neal.

She comes over nearly every day after that. I’m the only other girl her age nearby. When it rains we play Spit and War in our living rooms and on sunny days we swim out to the float that is for all the families on the point or play tennis on the disheveled court in the woods. She introduces me to the other kids. Most of them are my second cousins, though they don’t really believe that. Or maybe they don’t care. Even though we aren’t in school I can tell Gail is the popular type. She has that thrust of personality that matters so much more than looks. I follow her around, the tail to her kite, grateful to be mysteriously attached.

After two weeks my father calls during dinner. Nonnie answers and returns quickly.

“It’s Gardiner.” She stands in the doorway, waiting to see if my mother will take the call.

“I’m not sure you should,” my grandfather says, but my mother gets up and goes to the phone, which is below the stairs in the living room. She speaks so low we can’t hear much, but I can see her straight stiff back and the way she holds the receiver several inches from her ear. When she calls me in and passes the heavy black receiver to me, my father asks me to come home.