Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“Dad,” she said, “I’m not going to Laos.”

How strange it was to call him that. When she was a child, she’d had no need of any name for him, because whom else could she have been addressing?

The camera went back into its box, and when Maggie returned to Boston, she didn’t take it with her. Her father never said a word. He was still hoping she would change her mind, hoping she would bring it with her to film life in a foreign country. It’s what she has ended up doing, too, if not in the country of his choice. She tries not to feel too guilty about the pleasure and solitude that filming brings. The time alone may not be in the spirit of a commune, but the camera is one thing she doesn’t want to share.

The bathroom door’s ajar when she knocks on it, the camera in one hand and the tape recorder slung from a shoulder. She can see Rhea sitting on the toilet with the lid down, reading a magazine and watching over Judd and Jeffrey as they bathe in the claw-footed tub.

“All right if I film in here?” Maggie asks.

“Go ahead,” says Rhea. “There’s no shame in these parts.” She has a tinkling voice that gives each word its own particular tone but lays emphasis on none, like a pianist running through scales. Turning to the boys, she snaps, “Jeffrey! I saw that, young man.” Her dress is practically a sack, and with her pageboy haircut, her thin face, and her small body, she seems rather like a child herself, yet she’s lordly and indomitable in the humid air, commanding the boys to soap and rinse. After tucking away the magazine and adjusting her dress, she cranes her neck to glance in the mirror by the sink, while Maggie kneels and frees her hands to hold the camera by squeezing the microphone between her legs.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” she says to Rhea, focusing on her through the lens.

“Film us! Film us!” shouts Judd. Jeffrey joins him in the chant, but it’s quelled by a maternal glare.

“She’s always filming you,” Rhea tells them. “Right now she wants to talk with Mommy.” Brightening as she shifts back to Maggie, she folds her hands in her lap. “So what do you want to know?”

“Why don’t you tell me what it’s been like for you up here?”

Rhea sighs. “The boys have pink eye. Yesterday Dimitri burnt his elbow.” She pauses and laughs. “There I go again! My sister always says to me, ‘Rhea, you’ve got to stop defining yourself by other people’s crises.’ ”

“Where does your sister live?” Maggie asks.

“New York. Fashion writer, no kids. Rest of my family’s in Lexington.”

“You miss them?”

“Nah, it hasn’t been long enough. You miss yours? I heard about your father—” She makes a face as if she has given the wrong answer on a game show.

“I’m all right,” says Maggie. “Go on, tell me how you’ve found it here.”

Rhea thinks a bit before she answers. “Well, I guess things are mostly the same. There are little twists like the accent, and the store clerks are so rude. I don’t expect them to be just like Americans, but they could at least be nice. Right, Judd?” She speaks in the direction of the bath. “You should be nice to people?” Maggie pivots to capture the top of Judd’s head nodding.

“I can’t imagine living here permanently,” says Rhea. “I want the boys to grow up with their grandparents and aunts and uncles around.” She peers past the camera. “You’re not really going to spend your life here, are you, Maggie? For God’s sake, whenever I leave my toothbrush by the sink, somebody else uses it.” She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but there are plenty of spongers, too. Not naming any names.” Suddenly she stares straight into the camera. “You know who you are!” she booms, then laughs. “It’s a nice old house, at least. You think it was really part of the Underground Railroad? I don’t believe it, but you never know.”

“That’s great,” says Maggie, drawing away from the viewfinder.

“What, is that all?” Rhea sounds disappointed.

“I’m out of film,” Maggie explains.

“Oh—good,” says Rhea without much enthusiasm. “Now we can really talk.” In a friendlier tone, she asks, “How are you doing?”

“Why, what have you heard?”

“Oh, nothing. We just never seem to chat, do we? It’s Brid’s fault. You can’t get a word in edgewise.” A second later there’s a geyser of water from the tub and a high-pitched cry of pain. “Judd, don’t kick,” she orders, then waits for peace to return before she speaks again.

“Fletcher has got quite the set-up here,” she continues. “It isn’t much of a commune, but it’s cute how straight he wants things to be. Some folks think he’s only slumming it here after Cybil Barrett dumped him, but that’s just silly, right?”

“It better be,” says Maggie, laughing uneasily. She wonders who has been saying such things. To change the subject, she asks, “You really can’t imagine staying up here?”

“Not if Dimitri gets his job back.” Rhea looks at Maggie intently. “You knew he was fired, right?”

Maggie shakes her head. Fletcher only told her that Dimitri was in between things.

“Well, it wasn’t a surprise,” says Rhea. In a lower voice, she adds, “Did you know he got into speed?”

Maggie says she didn’t.

“He had me trying it, even,” says Rhea. “He had me trying a lot of things.” She glances back at the boys, whose attention seems focused on some unseen aquatic phenomenon. “I figured out pretty fast I wasn’t into that stuff, but Dimitri had some people in his life who were bad influences.”

“The dragon lady!” exclaims Judd, looking up at her. For a moment Rhea appears horrified. Then she gives a sigh.

“The dragon lady,” she agrees. Leaning toward Maggie, she says, “One night he came home so strung out he couldn’t remember the kids’ names. I told him that was it, no more drugs, no girls, or else. So he went cold turkey, tried Zen, spent three weeks in a field near Hartford building a geodesic dome. Fine, I thought, whatever works. But in June I spotted the tracks on his arms, and a few days later so did his boss.”

It’s Maggie’s turn to glance at Judd and Jeffrey.

“Oh, I don’t care if they hear it,” says Rhea. “They need to know their father isn’t the Almighty.”

“Are things better up here, at least?” Maggie asks, and Rhea’s overtaken by a look of gloom.

“I wanted them to be. We’ll see. He goes out a lot.” Seeing Maggie’s puzzlement, she adds, “Not in the car, just walking. He says he’s looking for the cat.”

As if she’s just remembered something, she stands and strides over to the tub, picks up a wet washcloth, and begins to wipe at Jeffrey’s neck.

“It’s cold!” he shouts, enraged and ducking. “I don’t like it!” Rhea dips the cloth into the bath, wrings it out, and reapplies it.

“It’s no fun for me either,” she mutters, scrubbing hard. In a brighter tone, she says to Maggie, “I hope you won’t mind me saying something.”

“No, of course not,” Maggie replies, still trying to wrap her brain around what Rhea has already told her.

“The problem with Fletcher,” says Rhea, “is he’s too hard-headed.”

Suddenly Maggie realizes she does mind. She wants to say as much, but Rhea doesn’t give her the chance.

“Fletcher never listens at meetings, he only talks. All that stuff about the bourgeois machinery and the repressive state apparatus—the rest of us hashed that out years ago. We were going to teach-ins when Fletcher was on his parents’ yacht every weekend. Now we’ve moved on. Hold still, I’m almost finished,” she instructs Judd. To Maggie, she says, “I know he’s trying to show his father he can run a business up here, but he’s too uptight. You know what I mean?” Maggie nods absently and Rhea smiles. “Of course you do. You’re a good listener. Fletcher could take a page from your book.”