The Family Tabor

Most of them have become humanists, without calling themselves such, nearly evangelical in extolling its creed about the value and agency, individually and collectively, of human beings, advising her to waste no time worrying about the end. The end is irrelevant, it only matters what came before, during all those days when they lacked sufficient awareness of their own freedom and progress, when they were fully, but perhaps ungratefully, alive. She is grasping it all. And their need of her, the way they attempt to raise themselves a little higher on their pillows when she steps through their doors, has provided her with a modicum of the purpose she felt in the Trobriand Islands.

Sitting with them, talking with them, hearing all that they want to say, allowing herself to be the surrogate for those they once loved, for those who preceded them in death, for those who have disappeared, or abandoned them, or are too far away, or busy, or disinterested, to make their way to Lilac Love, to enter one of these quiet rooms, to hold a translucent hand that reveals its thinned blue veins, its age spots, its bird-fragile bones, its spasms—to give comfort and succor as once, surely, the fragile people shriveling away in their neatly made beds gave comfort and succor to them. Being present with the dying is a powerful draw. She is not out in the field, but she has a seat at the edge of eternal space. And it’s helping her.

She has submitted an application to the Peace Corps, selecting Nepal, Peru, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and Burkina Faso as places where she would be interested in serving, because imagining herself exploring the world again helps lift the heaviness; it’s what she needs to hold onto. She felt proactive executing the paperwork for this potential alternative, which could eliminate waiting two years for the next expedition. It also had the unpleasant effect of reinforcing her current unsteadiness—never before would she have doubted the security of her place on any expedition, but she was questioning herself so much that she could no longer presume her luck was not already broken. She hasn’t mentioned the Peace Corps to her family or to Valentine. She tells herself it’s because she hasn’t yet been accepted, but the truth is, even if she’s accepted, she’s been thinking she’s not ready to go, is far from full strength, needs more time at this final station before death, with its eschatological light, and the personal trinkets on bureaus like lucky charms overseeing what everyone hopes will be a painless transition to whatever is on the other side. Although they take nothing from their old religions, what remains is the contradictory notion that on the other side there might be some unearthly bliss.

In spite of her own state, being at Lilac Love is providing Camille with a palliative kind of earthbound bliss.

But there are bad nights when it is difficult to shake the belief that she is losing, has already lost substantial ground, in the race of life. Everyone else is moving forward, moving up, growing up. Actually, they’ve grown up. They have spouses and life partners. They have kids, are having kids, are actively thinking about having kids, or are already fearing they’ve left it too long, going for checkups and tests to determine sperm motility, egg viability. They have capital-H homes, with great aesthetics, and original art on the walls. They have window washers, housekeepers, nannies, personal trainers, and sometimes chefs. They have mutual funds and 401(k)s and stock portfolios, vacations booked in advance, clothes for every conceivable occasion. And yet lately, when she forces herself to go to a cocktail or dinner party, the favorite conversational topic is about giving everything up. These discussions, in which Camille does not participate, go on for hours while everyone drinks artisanal vodka and small-batch IPAs and eats complicated catered food.

Last week, at another such gathering, Camille listened again to her friends pronouncing they would pare down to the basics, live in some uninhabited place. They made suggestions to one another and promises and began drawing up plans. The flying rhetoric had set those friends aflame, but demonstrated only their ignorance.

She had pictured herself holding up a hand to end the inane conversation, saying: “Look at me. Look at Camille Tabor, your friend. I am a PhD. I have studied hard and done serious fieldwork. I have been named an up-and-comer in my profession, of which only a few make it to the top, which I am expected to reach. I have led a research expedition to the Trobriand Islands. I managed half a million dollars for that expedition. I did groundbreaking research there and wrote a massive dissertation deemed phenomenal. And to accomplish all of that, I have given up so much. It’s demanding, consuming work, and this life of mine does not lead naturally to riches. I understand, it was my choice, but trust me, I’d like the financial freedom you take for granted. You’re all pretending to pine for some nonmaterialistic, Waldenesque life, but here are the facts: none of you know what you’re talking about. None of you would do well outside of your comfort zones, without your possessions. If you were really interested in a life off the grid, you would have interrogated me about my years in the Trobriands. I’m the only one whose career ensures I will live, have already lived, the very existence you now say you want. And yet you asked me nothing about the Trobrianders, about what life there is really like. If you had, I would have told you that they have a different outlook on sex, and on families, and subscribe to a collective notion of cohabitation, rather than the isolation you all expect and prefer. And they have spirits, and commune with the natural world in a way that has nothing to do with your gardeners planting rows of organic vegetables for you to pluck and wash and show off. Gardeners you plan to bring to your Walden when you chuck everything. Instead, you asked me the flying time to the Trobriands, and what months are the high season, and if AmEx is accepted there? So stop your silly bellyaching, your insulting chatter about how your lives would be so much better if you didn’t want private schools for your children and the getaway home on one of the San Juans. Admit you like your easy and luxurious existences in this world you’ve conquered with your own drive and ambition.”

Of course, she didn’t say any of that.

She hasn’t always judged so harshly; she knows she was lucky growing up as she did, with loving parents and few worries, but in her fluctuating despair, it struck her as particularly unfair that these friends had never been halted, as she was now. And that they believed in the value of their stupid utterances, while Dr. Jin had suggested that the purely social anthropological ramifications of her work on those islands might not be of great interest. This world, with its inventions and advances, would always dominate, she understood that. But there was enormous value in exploring her preferred worlds, which offered solutions that would allow everyone, not only those topping the pyramid, to cohabit happily on this planet; solutions embedded in the concept of the greater good. Being among these people she once liked, she was outraged by their obliviousness, and the false, transitory abandonment of their avariciousness. They might think they wanted to be somewhere far away, but their gazes stopped at the gates of their affluent existences.

She had refilled her glass with the expensive vodka she only drinks at these parties, and debated whether to move back to Melanesia. If she wasn’t there under the color of official research, she would really be living there. And that meant a life trading what you don’t need for what you do—which she greatly admires—or, if you had nothing that anyone wanted, you acquired what you needed by paying for it with bundles of dried banana leaves. She’d be on a Trobriand beach for the rest of her life, wearing a grass skirt on festival days, engaging in intriguing rites and rituals, and creating her own banana-leaf wealth—which she knew she could do—but banana-leaf wealth wasn’t exchangeable for currency accepted anywhere other than on those islands. She wouldn’t be able to explore all the other tribes she wanted to meet in their distant locales or make her way home to see her parents and sister and brother and nieces. If she returned to Melanesia, she’d be as stuck there as she was here, a difference only between the literal and the metaphoric. Stuck is stuck, wherever you may be.

She’d left that cocktail party buzzed, and angry with herself. With the depression that had flattened her and twisted her out of her life. With Valentine heading to a dig in South Africa, led by a famous physical anthropologist who had found very old bones in a system of caves. She’d seen him off at SeaTac earlier that day, and he was up in the sky on his way to a cave in a valley next to a mountain next to a river in the Cradle of Humankind, drafting the first of the several emails he’s now sent her, all iterating the same thing—Camille, to be clear, we are not taking a break. I say this with love, but you are too young to be spending your days with the dying. Don’t you want us to be happy, to live a happy life together?—while she was unsteadily heading for her front door, thinking that unlike her friends, her colleagues, her older sister, she wasn’t sure about marriage or children, and those were the topics Valentine was talking about before he jetted away. Wanting her to marry him, wanting them to have children, for her to bear tiny versions of themselves. She couldn’t imagine any of it, not with her life turned so juvenile. She couldn’t see herself with a husband, a mate, a partner. Couldn’t envision herself with children who would perhaps have her witch hazel eyes, Valentine’s philosophical spirit, their shared hunger for lives filled with the rigorousness of novel experiences. If she were twenty or younger, her mother would have penetrating insights and suggestions Camille could put into effect to unravel her depression, her confusion, but she had never asked before, and at thirty-six, she’s aged beyond her mother’s vaunted professional expertise.

And yet that party was days ago, and what is she doing right now?

She’s heading home to Palm Springs, where she could get some familial, or maternal, or psychological help figuring out how to reclaim her life. She couldn’t bear if that life was now closed to her, if she never regained her strength, her tenacity.

She’s thinking about all of this as she wheels her small bag from her ground-floor room, down the sidewalk, and into the lobby of the motel in San Luis Obispo, where she spent last night. Her sleep was restless and she needs coffee, and there on the laminated table sit urns of French Roast, Decaf, Hot Water, tiny tubs of dried creamers and sweetener packets, baskets of tea bags and hot cocoa packets, a tray of lopsided Danish, a stack of napkins several inches high. The purported breakfast free with a night’s stay.

She’s alone, the kid at the front desk busy putting keycards for the rooms into their slots, and then the glass doors spring open, and a clutch of elderly women bustles in, sporting backpacks and fanny packs, sensible walking shoes and sticks. Eight of them, barefaced and wrinkled and happy, talking and laughing, pouring their coffees, dunking their tea bags, splitting Danish, debating whether the day’s expedition should be to the Santa Lucia Range, or the La Panza Mountains, or the Montaña de Oro State Park. Maybe it’s their age and their brusque warmth that reminds Camille of her heroines.

She nods and smiles and says, “Morning,” to the old happy women, and the old happy women nod and smile and say, “Morning,” to her.

She takes it as an encouraging sign, her default into researcher mode, wanting to ask them how they’ve all come together, what bonds they share, where they hail from, who the leader is, who the followers, what this trip signifies, but she doesn’t. She’d sound crazy to them, and so she refills her large Styrofoam cup, secures the lid, and pushes out through the lobby doors, into the already-warm air at seven twenty in the morning.

She unlocks her car, new when it was her college graduation present, slips the cup into its holder, the bag into the back, herself into the driver’s seat. She is about to start the second and final leg of her drive. In less than five hours she’ll be on Agapanthus Lane.

When she left Seattle at the crack of dawn yesterday, she promised herself she would use the nearly twenty highway hours wisely. Instead, she wasted the first fifteen listening to music, to talk radio, to a popular true-crime podcast she found detestable and clicked off after ten minutes. And whenever the thoughts started churning, she shooed them away. But it’s time to decide various things:

Whether or not she should end things with Val because she is no longer the person she was when they met.

Whether or not she should attempt to turn her doctoral dissertation into some kind of tell-all book, despite her abhorrence of the idea.

Whether or not she will go where the Peace Corps sends her, if they want her.

Whether she will pretend to Dr. Jin that she’s back to normal, and ask him to find out when an assistant professorship in their department might come up, or in any university’s soc. anthro department, and to make those calls to the journals, to learn if there is a rare opening, or might be one in the near future, and she could say, “In the meantime, let me be your research assistant, starting fall semester,” a better proposition than trading distant fieldwork for research of local trends in disease, overpopulation, land use, and urban dialects. She’s not interested in those areas, so why use up the little energy she has to pursue an opportunity she doesn’t want—when winning would mean a chilly office, appropriate business attire, and, likely, immediately quitting. No matter that she’s stalled now; she doesn’t want any marks against her growing reputation. If she still had her natural energy, she knows what she would do: develop a new research proposal, submit it to her university and every anthropological organization that funds exploration, and when she had the money, she’d head off once more, seeking the exotic, with a clear and stated purpose. But figuring all of that out seems impossible, mind-boggling, and utterly exhausting.

And, finally, whether she will reveal to her family the depression she has been suffering from, severe enough that she has relegated her expensive and wide-ranging education and years of diligent, imaginative, and difficult work to a back burner, to the closet, that she is spending eight hours a day tending to those on the way out, when once she was only interested in figuring out how those most uniquely alive lived.

The interstate is quiet this early, and when she sees no police cars ahead or behind, or tucked into the verges and waiting to pounce, she sets her cruise control to eighty, then checks her watch. Last night, Phoebe left a voicemail commanding Camille to call her today. “While we’re both driving to the place we seem incapable of not calling home, we can talk about things we won’t be able to talk about there, or at least not easily, or at least not without Mom sitting down next to us, caressing our hair—wait, I forgot, Mom always knows everything. Shit, I hope that’s not really true—” The message had ended with Phoebe’s laugh.

Does she want to call her pluperfect older sister, founder of her own law firm, who rents a charming apartment, though she could, on a whim, purchase an embassy-sized house in the most expensive Los Angeles neighborhoods, who, despite trouble finding a husband, knows she absolutely wants one of those and the eventual children, who has never experienced a moment of depression or doubt or indecision, who wouldn’t understand what it feels like to be dragged under the waves of one’s life? Camille’s kept everything from her family, including Phoebe, when they trade their infrequent telephonic confidences.

She stares down the long, straight highway. If she calls Phoebe at eleven, she has three and a half hours left to gather herself together, to sound like the Camille her sister thinks she knows, the Camille they all think they know.

FIVE

BEST OF SEVEN?” HARRY calls out to Levitt.

Levitt, already wiping sweat from his forehead with his terry-clothed wrists, says, “Why do you insist on subverting protocol? It’s best of five, Harry. Best of five at the US Open. Best of five at Wimbledon. And there’s no way you and I can go seven in this heat. Best of three, like we do every Saturday. Is this your attempt to psych me out, gain the upper hand?”

“Of course I know the protocol. I’m being a caring friend, offering you a shot at taking me down, because I’m feeling extraordinarily energetic today.”

“Yeah, yeah, Harry. Just serve.”

Harry bounces the yellow ball, six, seven, eight, nine times, to unbalance Levitt, who is bent over at the waist, at the ready, those thick tree trunks of his in a wide, imposing stance.

Harry feels the sun on his face, hears the solid thump of the ball on the warm court, the happy yips of small dogs freed from their leashes. Then, like a thunderbolt to the brain, he’s thinking about King David and Queen Esther, the way they yipped happily, flicking their tails, circling around their new masters as Harry and Roma and Phoebe and Camille headed away from the great rambling house in Connecticut that was no longer their home. It belonged now to the buyers, that replacement family who was waving, the husband and wife the same ages as Harry and Roma, the little boys nearly the same ages as Phoebe and Camille, the family who took title and said yes, they would be delighted to take the Tabor family’s dachshunds as well, agreeing it wouldn’t be right to uproot the dogs from their puppyhood home, and impossible to travel thousands of miles with them, when the dogs couldn’t tolerate speed, would be carsick within minutes.

Levitt calls out from across the court, “You going to serve in this century?” Harry hears him, but he can’t respond, struck by these memories of King David and Queen Esther, dogs he gave to his girls when all four were young, by his ability to hand them over so easily to a family he knew nothing about, except that their financials were in order and they hadn’t required a mortgage. He doesn’t even recall their last name, despite seeing it on nearly every page of the purchase and sale agreement.

Why is he thinking about King David and Queen Esther, when he has not thought about them since 1987, since seeing them in the rearview mirror of the Caravan, as he and his family drove away to a new life. It is a memory he has never called up in all of these years, not even a memory he has ever had, but it is in his mind now. The girls were crying in the backseat, weren’t they? Yes, he can hear his daughters crying, tiny hands hitting the sealed windows, yelling, “Let the dogs in, let the dogs in, we can’t leave them behind.” But he had left them behind. Had let his daughters cry themselves out. Had not turned to witness the emotion on Roma’s face. She had, after all, sadly and reluctantly agreed to the dogs’ dispensation.

“Hey, you okay over there?” Levitt calls out, rising from his competitor’s crouch, loosening the grip on his racquet.

Harry’s heart is pounding, like a bomb is about to go off in there, and he leans over, head between his knees, hoping those forgotten dogs aren’t a very strange version of his life passing before his eyes, hoping he’s not about to be ejected from his existence by a heart attack this minute, hoping he didn’t put himself in the crosshairs of an evil eye last night by thinking how far he is from death.

But then it passes.

The memory is still there, but its toothy grip is easing.

He straightens up and says, “Sorry. Should have had more than coffee this morning. I’m fine. Let’s go. You ready?”

SIX

HE’S SPRINTING UP A winding hill in his neighborhood, his breath loud in his ears, the asphalt black under his beating feet, black ravens flying out of the trees, an avian army buzzing his head, flapping their wings, diving at him, their beaks pecking and pecking and pecking, their claws finding purchase on his head, his neck, his arms, his legs, his back, and then Simon Tabor is awake, fetal-curled, fists clenched, hair and body as wet as if he has just emerged from an ice bath, his insides hollowed out by the certainty that something is desperately wrong. He will never get used to this, to the way he is left with voids—in his heart, as if that organ has lost mass or blood flow; in his throat, as if that narrow tube has opened wide and air is racing inside; and in his abdomen, as if he is starving to death, though it’s not hunger at all that he feels. And this morning, there is a new element, unshed tears blinding his sight.

Slowly he unkinks his cramped arms and legs and turns over. The tears settle in the wells of his eyes, and he is loath to blink, loath to touch them, even more fearful than usual because he has no idea what this latest indignity means.

Lions charging at him yesterday, ravens today, during the frightening half hour of near-slumber, and now he is crying. It’s Sisyphean, when he’s already been laboring with his hijacked sleep, with his terror in having forgotten how to do what is natural, with his inability to figure out why this is happening, at such odds with how he otherwise perceives his life: as a mostly happy man whose marriage, young children, and professional pursuits mostly afford him pleasure and satisfaction.

A movement in the bed, Elena shifting under the striped comforter. In this year of his sleeplessness, he has learned his wife wakes in stages. He had not known that fact before. Deep sleep on her stomach until she shifts to her left side, facing away from him. Then the countdown begins. Twenty minutes until she shifts onto her back, the slightest of whistles coming through her full lips, thinned by dreams. Another twenty before she cracks one eye open, then the other.

He looks at the long line of Elena’s hip. When his misbegotten nights were new, she suggested supposedly surefire ways to shut down his nonsensical thoughts: walking after dinner; meditating before bed; taking a boiling-hot shower in their unlit bathroom and crawling wet between the cool sheets. Desperate, he tried it all. Altered his diet, too—no meat, no cheese, cut back on his drinking. Increased his exercise—yoga first, then cycling instead of yoga, and now, instead of cycling, he runs hard and fast and long every morning. But what is a boon for his body has done nothing for his soul, has not altered his inability to sink down into bliss, too aware of the spirits gathering around him in the dark. Only recently has a thought begun to form, that what he needs perhaps cannot be supplied by healthy eating or abstinence or exercise.

In the beginning, in that first month when he thought his failure to sleep was a temporary malfunction, he rocked the bed in the middle of the night and palmed the perfect globes of Elena’s ass, hoping sex would empty his brain, but Elena had sighed and mumbled, “I’ll get the pills.” A sylph in a nightgown that left her shoulders and back bare, the long yards of her black hair tight in a bun, his sleep guru refusing her mission, and when the light in the bathroom flicked on, Simon called after her, “What pills?”

Sleeping pills prescribed to Elena a year after Lucy’s birth, expired before Isabel was born.

“They’ve expired,” he’d said when she handed him the orange container. He’d looked inside and been unable to tell if, or how many, she’d ever taken.

“I think it takes decades to break down the components. They’re probably as strong, or nearly as strong, as when I got them. Give it a go. Nothing lost and all that.”

He had wanted to ask why she needed sleeping pills during that exciting time when Lucy was walking and laughing, her hands reaching out to the world, but Elena’s eyes were already closed, her breath even and composed.

For several successive nights, he took a pill that was small as a dot and weightless on his tongue, hoping she was right, but she wasn’t; potency was vanquished by time. When he told her the pills didn’t work, she looked at him in frustration. “So call the doctor and get a new prescription.” Which he did, and he took them for several more nights, but his body refused the sedation, simply wouldn’t be knocked out.