Backwater Read online

“You will not perform in the street for food. Ever.”

  “And let’s not forget Vesta Breedlove, Dad, who came over on the Mayflower with her birds, Florence and Luther. Everyone told her she was crazy, the birds wouldn’t survive, but they did better than her husband, who got buried at sea. But she kept going, Dad—built herself a log cabin at the edge of the colony just big enough for her and the birds, and said although she mourned her dead husband, she’d always preferred the company of Florence and Luther, so no one had to worry about her.”

  Dad’s face turned bright fuchsia. He slammed his fist on the kitchen counter, rattling the stoneware. “You have nothing in common with a person like that! Breedloves do not emulate disturbed people!”

  It was the second angriest I’d ever seen him. The first was when I backed into the rhododendron bushes, terminally scratching the Lexus.

  I’m told my mother, a social worker, was more reasonable about things. Social workers usually are. She worked for New York’s Department of Social Services helping poor women fight bad landlords and battered women get to safety. She was always railing at a system that kept poor women down. One of her clients named a baby after her.

  I’ve done my best to piece Mom’s life together from the snippets I’ve gotten from other people. She didn’t have a diary or stacks of old letters, but she had boxes of history books. In one history book about women Mom wrote, “This is my family tree.” I’ve thought hard about why she wrote that. I think it’s because Mom was adopted; she never knew who her biological parents were. I think she found in the history of all women’s struggles a deep connection to family. Whenever I read about women in history, I feel my mother’s spirit pushing through the pages.

  I did a rubbing of her gravestone a few years ago. It took me longer than usual because I kept crying.

  Hers says simply: She embodied grace.

  Dad wrote it.

  The man has his moments. I try to remember this when he gets impossible. He helps me with my homework whenever I need it. He comes to career day at my school and talks about the joys of lawyering. He works harder than anyone I know. He’s always studying something—he doesn’t just read the newspaper, he scrutinizes it. He pours over his legal briefs, takes reams of notes. He stays up late reading, too. Dad says he doesn’t need much sleep, but his eyes have always looked tired to me. He has long lists of what he has to do and follows to the letter. He makes long lists of what I have to do, which I keep losing. On lists with more than ten action items he pens, I’m doing this for your own good—Love, Dad, to shield the blow. Dad says that without lists we never accomplish all the tasks set before us. I suppose this is true.

  Dad never, ever relaxes. Sometimes I watch him reading in his chair in his study and he’ll squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head hard and hit his fist on the desk like he’s got something bottled up inside that he wants to keep down there. After that, he starts reading again. A lawyer’s inner life is a true mystery.

  It was almost six. Long shadows crept across the cemetery. Genghis, my toy poodle, scurried toward me wagging his little brown tail.

  “Come on, boy.”

  Genghis jumped on my pants leg, scooted back on his teeny hind legs. I scooped him up and arranged him in my pocket with his head and front paws sticking out.

  Dad says Genghis isn’t a dog, he’s an accessory.

  Easy for him to say. I was bit by a large dog when I was little. Any canine over ten pounds makes me nervous.

  I wiped off my jeans and headed to the big house to have dinner with my family.

  2

  “All right now, if we work together, we can make this movie happen.”

  A spotlight shone in the living room. Fiona was dressed to kill with all her television make-up on, holding a video camera. Her lips curled over her teeth, which is how Fiona smiles.

  I looked at the oil painting of my great-grandparents that hung over the stone mantel. It was painted right after they were married. They paid the artist a little every week for two years during the Depression—it was the only way they could afford such a keepsake for generations to come.

  Fiona studied the room. “We’ll start with a tight close-up on the painting … and then as Archie and Dan start reading from the script, the camera will pan the room to get the sense of history …”

  My father held a script in his hand, looking uncomfortable. Fiona pointed to him. “This is the story of a family,” Dad read, “a very special family; a family that has known strength and weakness, joy and sorrow. This is the story of the Breedloves.”

  She had to be kidding. You could say that about any family.

  Dad bungled his next line: “Our ancestors are the bricks and mortar upon which our family has been built.”

  He got it right on the third take.

  “Now,” Fiona announced shrilly, “the camera will pan the dining room and the quilt on the wall, and then Archie, you say the part about how the old family home has been preserved by the generations and is still a gathering point for the family today.”

  Egan tripped over a tangle of wires connecting the spotlights.

  “Cut!”

  I decided to use the moment. “Aunt Fiona, aren’t you going to talk about the story behind the painting? Or what about the quilt? Great-Great-Great-Aunt Cecilia embroidered the names and birth dates of twelve Breedlove children on it. She prayed for each baby when she was doing it. She was sick when she worked on the last three squares, but she held on until she finished. It took her twelve years. That quilt is narrative folk-art history!”

  Fiona looked at the quilt and mumbled. “I could have saved that woman years of unnecessary labor.” Then she shook her head and glared at me. “We want sounds and images, Ivy. There’s no time for stories.”

  She checked her script. “Now we’ll quickly move around the copper kettles—”

  I stepped forward. My face was hot. “Comfort Breedlove carried the copper kettles from New Hampshire to New York and she engraved every part of the journey on the sides, from the sicknesses, to the fears, to the weather conditions and the beauty of the landscape. You can’t quickly move around a thing like that!”

  Fiona said Comfort would have arrived at her destination sooner if she hadn’t spent all that time engraving.

  I said the worst thing a person could say in front of Aunt Fiona.

  “Sometimes saving time doesn’t matter!”

  “Doesn’t matter?” She threw back her head and laughed so coarsely that her silver earrings shook. “Isn’t that just like a teenager.” She said “teenager” the way some people say “serial killer.”

  Tib rammed her white cane on the floor and said I was right.

  Cousin James waved his arms like he did in court and said Fiona knew what she was doing.

  Dad threw down his script and said he was hungry.

  Archie asked Dad to please show respect for another professional who was trying to do her job. Dad responded by storming out of the room.

  Fiona approached me like a brilliant director forced to work with peons.

  “Take some advice from a professional, dear. When you’ve mastered time, you’ve mastered life.”

  She always said that line at the end of her cable TV show and the audience would applaud and cheer until their mouths frothed with time-saving enthusiasm. She patted my cheek. “I think that we’ll do the interviews in the living room after dinner. You were going to change for supper, weren’t you, Ivy?”

  I looked down at my wet jeans and wet hiking boots. My lumberjack shirt was dirty, but dry.

  I ran upstairs, put on my Ann Boleyn memorial sweatshirt with the hood flipped back humorously (she was beheaded). She was my favorite of Henry the VIII’s dead wives. I ran back down.

  “Well,” said Fiona, swishing past me, “is this how you want to appear to others?”

  I smoothed back my hair and grinned for posterity.

  * * *

  I picked at my dessert (rum cake with candied walnuts); I’d
worked hard to bake it. It was a historic family recipe dating back to the early nineteen hundreds when my great-great-grandmother was said to have gotten several serious suitors on the strength of her rum cake alone. I made the cake for my ex-boyfriend, Claude, but it was too late in our faltering relationship for dessert to wield any magic.

  Claude was always smiling, even when we fought. He reminded me of a dolphin—intelligent, fun-loving, content to ride the present wave. Claude lived for the moment, and I, who embrace the lessons of the past, found this severely limiting. We broke up last Fourth of July weekend when I refused to go to the fireworks display on July 1st because to do so would have been historically inaccurate. Claude said I was “overdoing the history thing.”

  It just goes to show you how historians are never appreciated.

  Athletes are.

  Actors.

  Big-time lawyers.

  In Sunday school my teacher used to say that the meek will inherit the earth. That was eight years ago.

  I’m still waiting.

  This is why I appreciate my best friend Octavia Harrison. She is the only teenager I know who thinks doing a family tree is interesting. Octavia is going to become a sociologist and study how different societies act and develop. She’s used to being misunderstood, too. Her favorite uncle died when she was ten, so we’ve also got loss in common. Last year we had a memorial service for my mom and Octavia’s Uncle Reuben. We lit candles and talked about them until four A.M. while eating white-cheddar popcorn (Mom’s favorite binge food) and garlic pickles (Uncle Reuben’s favorite). Octavia apologized about the pickles, but I told her you can’t change history, you’ve got to stay with the facts.

  Fiona was getting her video gear together again for the after-dinner interviews, talking about some research study that said forty-seven minutes is as long as a person can watch a video and retain information. Just about everyone thought that was fascinating.

  Tib was sitting next to me. She patted my hand. “You keep doing what you know is right,” she said firmly. “That’s more important than having a crowd of people appreciate your efforts.”

  “I know.” I hated that part about life.

  “It’s only a competition if you let it be,” Tib added.

  “I’m not competing.”

  Egan choked down a laugh when he heard me say it.

  * * *

  I need at least two hours to interview a person.

  Fiona interviewed six Breedloves in fifty-seven minutes.

  Everyone had six and a half minutes to speak.

  At the end of that time a buzzer went off.

  Fiona said that time needn’t be our enemy in this stress-packed world. Time could be our friend.

  Egan’s interview was the most time efficient.

  “Tell me, Egan,” Fiona asked, “what is your finest accomplishment up to now, do you think?”

  Egan thought about that and said he didn’t know.

  “What are some of the things you enjoy doing, things you’ve been successful at?”

  Egan thought and said he’d wasn’t sure.

  Fiona’s smile was getting thin. “What are some of your cherished childhood memories?”

  Egan thought and thought and couldn’t remember any.

  “Are you aware, Egan, that the videocam is running?”

  That much he knew.

  But she wasn’t getting to the heart of the family with her cable TV tactics any more than a surgeon could perform a heart by-pass with a plastic knife.

  Soundbites are to history what condensed books are to literature.

  Over the years I’ve learned how to be a penetrating interviewer because I’ve got the two things a good interviewer needs: curiosity and patience.

  I didn’t know I was good at it until I got thrown into interviewing two years ago as a freshman during flu season, which wiped out the entire staff of the Long Wharf Academy Advocate, including Lizzie Pucciari, an assistant editor who was coughing so bad she couldn’t take notes. But the paper had to come out and Mr. Leopold, the school newspaper’s advisor, asked me if I would interview the new Dean of Students, McAlaster Proust. Everyone knew Mr. Proust had cancer the year before, but no one ever mentioned it, like saying the word could be catching. Lizzie, from her sick bed, told me to ask him the usual stuff—where he went to school, what were his hobbies, how long had he been working in education—but I wanted to know what the cancer had taught him. I figured if it hadn’t taught him anything, the school was in trouble. So I asked him. And you know, he leaned back in his chair and talked for an hour about how scared he’d been and how having something like cancer puts everything in perspective. He felt he’d been given a second chance and he had an urgency to reach out to students and show them how to celebrate life. I mentioned that less homework might be one of the ways that all the students could celebrate life more fully, and he laughed and said he’d take it under advisement.

  I called the interview “From Disease to Enlightenment,” and the school secretary, Mrs. Fusser, hugged me in the hall and told me about her mother’s fight against cancer and how she had beaten it just like Mr. Proust had. Mrs. Fusser was going on and on about what an excellent interviewer I was. It’s a gift, I told her. You’ve got to get behind a person’s public mask to find the real humanity.

  I’m told my mother knew how to do that, even during her long bout with cancer. Tib said no one in this world fought harder to live than my mom. People would come to visit her at the hospital to cheer her up and she ended up helping them with their problems. That’s a social worker for you. I wish I had more personal memories of her. I have all her jewelry in a safe. I have the letter she wrote to me before she died that was dictated to a nurse about how she loved me and the riches she hoped life would bring. She wanted me to know that the absolute hardest part about dying was leaving me so young. She said history has proved that women can do anything. She said she had much more to tell me, but was getting tired and would finish the letter later. She never finished it; she died the next day. We called it “the unfinished letter” and like an unfinished symphony, it bore the sadness of death that had come in the middle of something instead of at the end.

  I listened to the roaring rhetoric coming from the living room. Uncle Whit was loudly debating a point on the economy and used FDR’s New Deal as an example. I walked over. I wanted to mention that the strength of the New Deal was that President Roosevelt realized that no one big plan could help the country—it had to be a string of little plans hitting America’s problems on all fronts to boost the economy. I tried making my point, but no one heard me. I waited until there was a lull in the conversation, but Breedloves forsake breathing when they talk. I even tried raising my hand, but I didn’t get called on.

  Then I did what I always do at family gatherings—curled up in the reading nook with a fat history book.

  “Just like Josephine,” Fiona whispered to Archie. “Ivy cloistered over there like she was better than all of us.”

  At the mention of Josephine, several Breedloves within earshot sucked in air. Thankfully, my father hadn’t heard. In this family, being like Josephine isn’t a compliment. This wasn’t the first time we’d been compared.

  Josephine is my aunt, and Dad and Archie’s sister who disappeared years ago. The last anyone heard, she’d been a struggling sculptor in Vermont. Tib said Josephine was a true loner; she needed to be by herself more than anyone Tib had ever met. Plenty of people thought she was a nutcase because of it. I’d have given just about anything to get her thoughts for the family history if I knew where she was. If she was even alive.

  I heard the sound of Scrabble letters pouring into a hat. Dad’s voice boomed, “What letter shall it be tonight?”

  The game was Legal Alphabet and I hated it. The point was to pick a letter, then people shouted out legal terms that began with that letter and the definitions. Speed and pushiness were vital skills.

  Thirteen Breedlove lawyers leaned forward as Dad drew his great
hand into the hat.

  “P!” he shouted in full-courtroom voice. “Perjury—an intentional lie told while under oath or in a sworn affidavit.”

  “Plaintiff!” shouted cousin Sarah. “The person who brings a case to court.”

  “Pro bono!” screamed cousin Brad, pushing past Sarah. “A service provided for free!”

  The game grew louder and stronger, the legal voices reaching a thundering crescendo. Two lawyers stood on chairs. One beat his breast.

  Makes you wonder about the species.

  Petition.

  Plea bargaining.

  Precedent.

  Patent.

  Uncle Archie’s hand slammed the table, rattling the chandelier above. “Pillory! A medieval punishment and restraining device.”

  “Peace,” I said gently, hoping the game would end. “A state of tranquility or quiet.”

  “Not in this house, Ivy!” boomed my father.

  “No kidding.”

  “We’ll make her a lawyer yet,” laughed Uncle Whit.

  Thirteen pairs of legal eyes stared at me.

  I looked away.

  If I’d had guts, I would have said it.

  Can’t you just let me be who I am?

  3

  It was seven A.M. I put my tape recorder on the dining room table and smiled at my father who was sitting across from me eating rum cake and coffee. I was about to interview him for the family history and I wasn’t expecting the search for truth to be pretty. Uncle Archie kept walking down the hall, pretending not to listen. He and Dad have been competing with each other since childhood.

  “I’m so interested in your memories of childhood, Dad.”

  Dad put down his fork tensely. “I had an excellent childhood.”

  Uncle Archie coughed from the hall.

  “I’m sure you did, Dad.”

  “We were a strong family, a good family.”

  Uncle Archie coughed again.

  “You must have some wonderful memories of that, Dad.”

  He sniffed and said nothing. Pulling molars was easier than this.

  “In what ways were you a strong family, Dad? Can you remember some specific moments?”