Bathtub Porsche

Outside the entrance to the club, someone has left a silver convertible bathtub Porsche unlocked, top down, with the keys in the ignition. The car is perfectly preserved: the dials are clear and crisp, the wood paneling on the dash is scratch- and chip-free, and the mileage is in the basement. The crimson leather is buffed smooth looks so inviting that for a split second I think of taking the car for a spin and work through the possibilities of what might happen to me if I did. There is however more to see. In the front seat is a bulletin from St. Aidan’s and from the keychain dangles an affinity card from our local co-op. To cap things off, the vanity license plate is the stock symbol of the company I work for (with dollar signs subbed in for the “Ss”).
I point out the car to Kate and Anne and receive dull shrugs. They are deep in talks about Pepper. I point out the car to Thomas. He nods at me and then leans inside, placing his sweaty palms on the driver’s side door.

“What are you doing?” I whisper-yell.

“What?” he says.

“Are you crazy?”

“Why are you whispering?”

He shrugs and walks off. He then sidles up to Kate, steps on her heels, and gives her a flat tire.

Kate screams and boxes his shoulders with her cupped hands.

Inside the clubhouse, Kate and Thomas each see someone they know and then both disappear simultaneously into thin air. Anne checks the tournament rosters and looks for open slots in this week’s mixers.

On the flat panel by the bar they are showing the PGA Tour at Hardscrabble. It has been a tough weekend at Fort Smith with high humidity, temperatures in the low nineties, and the real threat of thunderstorms.

A player I have always admired, a young South African named Weller, is leading by two strokes with play delayed by lightning. The golfers are sitting under tents hydrating and trying not to stiffen up, while the network splits the screen to show clips from the morning’s competition.

Our clubhouse is fairly full, given that the pool does not open for two more weeks and there is no place to sit comfortably and still see the television. The sounds of the match outside buffet against the large picture windows such that I can barely hear the scores announced. Anne motions to me that she is going outside to see for herself who is winning.

During the commercial break I feel the remote pangs of undefined needs (to change deodorant, to change laundry detergent, to change airlines, to change something) until a commentator from the evening news comes on to announce a profile she will be presenting on 60 Minutes of a local official who has come out against the war. The war is not going well enough to anyone’s liking (on either side of the political median, sparks have been flying, and with an election in the offing, these sparks are threatening to catch fire).

The other viewers, men and women whose faces I know from the years of Back-to-School luaus and holiday cookouts and mixers and swim meets (Kate swam for the Sharks for several years until she reached a certain age and metabolism and decided that swim team was making her fat), check their watches and their drinks and do the math. Soon it will be time to either head for home to check on thawing steaks and select a vintage, or to commit to staying and eating here. The club recently rebuilt the kitchen and the restaurant has had decent reviews to date, but part of me reasons that while we’re here, we’re not there, there being home, the one place we have the best chance of finding Pepper if she decides to come looking for us.

A voice I recognize finds me and catches me off guard. “Is she out there?”

Pepper

Pepper was—sorry, is—our beloved pointer who magically and supersonically slipped her lead a few days ago on a walk down Lakeshire to tear ass after a rogue squirrel and we haven’t seen her since, despite the LOST signs we made on the Mac, with the pictures of her in her brown herringbone Original Dog’s Nest®, and with the iconic paw prints and the broken hearts and the falling tears, and despite the good intentions of all our neighbors. At least twice a day now we get a call from someone claiming to have seen Pepper or to know her whereabouts, only to ask up front about the reward and then leave a phony number. Pepper’s disappearance comes a as a double blow for us after losing this past February our twenty-year old tabby to tainted designer cat food manufactured in China with lethal doses of arsenic and melamine.

Beyond the parking lot of the tennis club are a series of creeks and a wide scalloped ravine covered with dogwoods and loblollies and paved with a carpet of wild grasses, ivy, and Virginia Creeper. The space is earmarked as public land and is used as a major thoroughfare by ruminating, migrating deer and fugitive foxes. This area is also classified as a 100 year flood plain and after a heavy rain the ravine carries the excess water down and away from the club’s clay courts and the Olympic pool and out to the river basin to meet its final destiny.

Anne fumbles with her glasses and stares down into the ravine. Applause shoots up from the tennis courts. Someone has either just aced a serve or returned an unreachable shot, far down the line.

“Honey,” Anne says. “I don’t think that was her.”

We all four stare into the ravine together.

“It was probably just a fox,” I say.

“No,” Kate says. “It was Pepper.”

“That was no Pepper,” Thomas says. He burps a loud, resplendent burp that echoes off the other side of the ravine and the rows of trees there. He stretches again, holding both his arms high above his head. “That was no fox either.”

“What do you know?” Kate says, almost yelling. “You didn’t see anything; you had your nose in that stupid book.”

I put on my hat with the ear flaps and the neck tails.

“There are no gray foxes in this area,” says Thomas. “Never have been; never will be.”

Thomas’s naturalism, however inaccurate, is a holdover from his tenure in Troop 853.

“Do you have any more flyers?” I ask.

“No,” Kate says. “I used them all up at the farmer’s market.”

“We’ll make some more,” Anne says. “When we get home, we will. I bought more ink and paper at Staples.”

We stand there at the edge of the ravine and call Pepper’s name into the woods until we are almost hoarse. Shortly, there is the crashing sound of an animal tearing through the dogwoods down the far side of the ravine, most likely a spooked doe.

“You know what they say,” Thomas says. “If you love something, let it go. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it.”

Thomas has always been a bright, optimistic child, but lately (almost certainly coincidental to the inception of “Spyware”) it has been necessary to have discussions with him about his (hopefully) feigned cynicism and his unwieldy attempts at cruel wit. We are a peaceful people, us Marcussons, at least this northern Virginia branch, in general moderate to sometimes quite left-leaning, with a aversion for conflict armed or otherwise, a sincere distrust of big business, and a very real aversion to corporate agriculture. We eat red-meat in moderation, shy away from farm-raised fish, and opt for free range and antibiotic-free poultry. It is true, however, that our well-paying jobs, spending habits, and hobbies find us firmly in one particular demographic, when often we wish desperately to be in another. Indeed, on paper at least we sound like and could very well be distasteful people, when in fact we are quite the opposite (at least I like to think so).

Do I believe our choices make us better people? No, our choices only allow us the ability to align ourselves with what we think could be right in the best of all possible worlds and perhaps allow us a good night’s sleep in the process. Regardless, because of the aforementioned traits at times we find ourselves swimming upstream at both St. Aidan’s and at the Quaker school where we enrolled Tom and Kate several years ago. We kill for sustenance (though sometimes with Reynolds for sport also but never for trophies) and our overall position on conflict is clear. Though I have played contact sports, I have never been in a fist fight (though I’ve come close and can still think of a few people I would like to bop on the nose). In our family we do not have arguments we have conferences.

Still we have our moments.

“You suck,” Kate says.

“You won’t be saying that, Blondie, when I’m playing Wembley Stadium.”

We are apparently a hopeful, optimistic people as well.

Parlor Trick

I don’t remember the first time, but I learned early on in our time together how to look at Anne and see her as when we had first met, when we were complete, nameless strangers. The experience, as I recounted to Father Reynolds after one of our gin-primed debates over welfare (used deftly I think by me to steer the subject away from gay marriage) and once in a duck blind off the coast of Ocracoke, is similar to staring at the repetitive patterns of a fence or ornate wall until the wires or pickets or stones and mortar and their collective dimensions dissipate and everything appear to be floating in space right before your very eyes. The sensation lasts only a brief moment, and then when you reach out to touch it, it disappears and everything falls back again into its prescribed realm. In this manner of seeing, I could, for the first few years of marriage, if only for a second or two, remember Anne the way she was before I knew her, the way other people perhaps see her now, with her existence still pure, unmingled, uncrossed with mine.

I try this parlor trick now, with her resting under the shade of the glossy pines with her bottom on the hood of the wagon, worrying over the sunscreen, but I cannot pull it off. Even after squinting and crossing my eyes until they hurt, she is still who she is: a realtor, my wife of seventeen years (fiancée for two, girlfriend for one), and mother of two (and this is mutually agreed-upon) exceptional teenagers.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“Trying to remember where I saw it last.”

“Oh well,” she says.

She makes a sound like the air letting out of a balloon, and then makes a face, scrunching up her lips and her chin and furrowing her brow. Even still, she is too pretty: Looking at her, I feel a deep, nervous tension in the pit of my stomach and the tips of my fingers begin to tingle. I wonder if she looks at me this same way ever and if she did what would she see? Paul Erickson, ex-engineer, Darden graduate, sales manager for a Fortune 500 technology company, quickly closing in on forty, bluegrass and microbrews on the weekend, father of two (as previously agreed-upon) exceptional teenagers? Or the person I was before I crossed her path? A man essentially without purpose or form?

Anne pulls out of her leather tote two women’s sun hats and two baseball caps with ear and neck flaps. Anne puts her broad-brimmed straw hat on and hands Kate hers. She hands me the ball caps with a look of assignation. (I plan to stall the act as long as I can to avoid the confrontation with Thomas and the stream of protests which is sure to follow).

Kate thwaps her loafers down onto the pavement, puts her hair up into a knot, and folds the knot up into her hat. She slides her toes into her shoes and then crushes the backs of the loafers with her heels until the shoes are like flats. Somewhere a gnarled, old cobbler is crying.

Before I can remark, Kate takes off her sunglasses and says, “I think I saw Pepper.”

Sunscreen

Moments after pulling in to the far parking lot at Great Falls by the platform tennis courts and seeing the minivans and SUVs with stickers in the rear windows from Loomis Chaffee, Woodberry Forest, Georgetown, and UVa, and also stickers supporting both presidential candidates, and seeing the tents set up and the bleachers full of young tennis fans, it takes Anne no time at all to remark, “We’ve forgotten the sunscreen.”

Anne is paranoid about the sun and not without good reason: three years ago she had a basal cell carcinoma removed from just beneath the left side of her jaw. She and Kate are fair and seemingly more vulnerable than Thomas and I who, with our mystically-received Moorish genes from my mother’s Norwegian ancestors, have curly dark hair and skin that tans well without burning or freckling. (The original Ericksons apparently enjoyed sailing the warmer climes.) Anne and I remember both being in college in Chapel Hill stretching out on beach towels on the tiny strip of grass at Connor Beach, our bodies soaked in baby oil and surrounded by cardboard wrapped in tin foil, listening to the Talking Heads and Superchunk and R.E.M. coming from a handheld stereo broadcast from WXYC right across the street. That was probably when most of the damage was done, outside of her childhood on the cape, but the scare was real enough and we take it seriously now, carrying around spare bottles of sunscreen in the glove compartments or travel kits of both our cars (60+ SPF) and never letting the children out of our sight without a quick spritz.

“I’ll take a look,” I say. “I may have some in the back.”

My golf clubs (second-hand) and shoes (well-worn, first generation Foot-Joys) are sandwiched in the cargo area of the wagon along with a stack of wool blankets (in case of a snowbound crisis), a size 7 Winston fly rod in its protective olive green case (more than worth the money I paid for it, I’d say—based on its current appearance, the rod would have been beat to hell and back by now), an old Wilson football in need of air, my running shoes, a copy of an engineering journal with an article on solar-powered tree houses, an emergency road repair kit, a chewed-up, fluorescent green Frisbee (Pepper’s) that pulls to the left when you throw it, and the cooler we took to the farmer’s market. The ice in the cooler has started to melt and the chicory and the asparagus is floating on top alongside six recycled plastic bottles of kefir and two gallons of organic, hormone-free skim milk in glass containers. The jar of unprocessed raw clover honey has sunk to the bottom of the cooler under its own weight.

“No dice,” I say.

“Well,” Anne says. “We’ll have to cut it short. And we’ll have to wear the hats.”

Kate and Thomas take their time getting out of the wagon: Thomas is still reading his folded-up paperback, the earpieces of his iPod still wedged into his ears (I can never tell if the thing is actually on; he wears them around the clock solely to avoid conversation) and Kate is fixing her sunglasses and massaging her hair into place (she has Anne’s hair; it’s uncanny how the two of them could be fair-skinned, freckled twins). I study them emerging from the backseat and stretching—Thomas in his baggy skater shorts and tee-shirt covered with graffiti (he has a growing collection of band tee-shirts in black though this one is white with a picture of two stylized guitars crossed at his sternum); Kate in a beige skirt and pink polo—as though they are someone else’s children, someone else’s beautiful children, more beautiful than anything I could ever begin to take credit for, standing with someone else’s stunning, ageless wife, (in her white tennis skirt and her knit shirt from Roland Garros that shows off her shoulder caps and a pair of pristine Stan Smiths) who on any other planet would not be caught dead with the likes of me.

Stratford Landing

Otherwise the drive was not unpleasant. Co-eds were out in force in their cut-off shorts and tank tops and sunglasses and also in tennis and running shoes that gave their step and their pony tails an extra bounce. Graduate students were studying outside coffee shops and under shade trees in little open squares like Stratford Landing (that halfway reminded me of Paris) with books open across their knees or in their laps. Young mothers were pushing strollers with Sunbrellas, and over the ether, a newscast on the casualties in Basra was pleasantly cut short in favor of the Louvin Brothers.

It is a crystal clear day with almost zero cloud cover, save for some contrails that have split the sky and dissolved, and quite warm even for late-May. It is after all the kind of day that makes you think of sunscreen—or sunburn—and global warming almost instantly: wisteria in the air now and the trees and shrubs are Technicolor green. The Northern Lights and the Brick Ruffles (my favorites) and the Jack Sands are all in bloom now despite last year’s drought (they step down in great sweeping cascades of color across our lawn and the lawns of our neighbors), though too late for Easter, when the children of St. Aidan’s process from the chapel to the church and up the aisle to place fresh flowers at the base of the wood and wire cross until the altar is overflowing with color.

This year for Easter we were given a surprisingly adult dose of sleet and snow that began on Good Friday and ran through to Easter Monday (which is of course no longer a holiday). We lost power once or twice over the weekend, became fully dependent on wood heat and candle light, and the morning services were canceled.

At the evening service gone were the awkward, sheepish “alleluias” from Lent: they were replaced instead with an echo of silence after Father Reynolds pronounced the Resurrection, as though the utterance of praise had finally been drummed completely out of us and for good. The children’s processional was cut in half due to black ice on the brick sidewalks out front, so the children stood (in their dungarees and down vests and leather boots) in the narthex until they were signaled to begin. Tromping lead-footed down the aisle the children put the frozen nubs of bulbs and sprouts and bruised flowers on the altar anyway, and while the sentiment was there, the resulting effect was a deep, deep grayness and dreariness that made my heart sink.

We had long desired the release of spring and warmer weather and we received instead an extended sentence in a purgatorial winter. Even Reynolds must have felt it a week in advance. He must have known ahead of time that we were rushing headlong into conflict with nature, given his phoned-in sermon about a popular novel and film that had called into question the celibacy of Christ and the actuality of his death, and by extension his resurrection. That Reynolds felt this current, but fleeting, cultural icon was something that needed addressing further in the public dialogue was somewhat of a surprise to many of us and indicated that either a) we had vastly overestimated the intelligence of our fellow seekers, our Christian brethren or b) the good Father himself just wasn’t feeling it.

His must be a difficult yoke to wear day in and day out.

In short, everything about the day was the opposite of the renewal and the rebirth that I and so many others had been looking for after our long and painful exile in February. We had all (some more so than others) been clock-watching and calendar-turning for weeks now, looking for something to break apart and give way, and the sound of the frozen precipitation pinging the stained glass windows during the confession of sins made me want to cry.

But today. Today is the day. Today is the day we are shedding that dark robe of death. We are shedding that heavy, heavy mantle of destruction and despair and trading it in for Bill Monroe, for Foggy Mountain Breakdown, for the Osborne Brothers, for the Sunday Times and for the Post, for tennis in the afternoon, later for some gin, and perhaps some grass-fed steaks on the grill.

Another Sunday

ANOTHER SUNDAY.

A holy day for most people, our family typically included, though on a morning like this you just might doubt it, judging by the way we slept late (until almost ten!), drove about aimlessly spending money (eating brunch at the French bakery in Reston, reading the papers, and squirreling away the last stalks of the spring asparagus and the dregs of the chicory at the farmers’ market down in Dale City). Later we will put up a new batch of lost-and-found signs the children made on the Mac (with the iconic paw prints and broken hearts and falling tears), and then fritter away the remainder of our weekend at the club at Hollow Rock.

We managed to avoid St. Aidan’s like the plague, though in all fairness the evasive action was probably overkill. We’ve known Father Reynolds and his wife Linda for years: she and Anne play tennis together once a week (even though Anne is a 4.0 and Linda is at best a 2); he and I have been known to hunt ducks together down in Ocracoke, drink gin and argue (Anne and Linda call it “playfighting”) over the global economy, the war, gays in the Anglican church, and John Courtney Murray. Reynolds, like many Episcopalians, is an ex-Catholic and studied Murray at Weston (before meeting Linda in Cambridge and falling in love with her). I guess that’s what gives him the right, as much as anything else.

I took an elective many years ago, went to business school, and so I am allowed to fake it, and I do so fairly well, especially after a few gimlets. Reynolds is older than the both of us, by ten years at least, and maybe that much or more older than Linda who is of indeterminate age owing to pilates and an expert colorist. But Reynolds loves his wife and his parish, he shoots straight and well, and with respect to most things, I believe, he has his priorities sewed on straight, with the sole exception of a mean streak when it comes to same-sex marriages.

Of course Reynolds knows our children too (he baptized them both) and he knows our wagon and our coupe (the aging three-series convertible Anne still calls her “ride”). And though he, like any good rector worth his salt, wouldn’t give a flip one way or the other if we were in attendance, I still drove us several blocks north out of our way and then doubled back down 628 to get us heading south on 1, figuring on a clean getaway. When we got to Riverside, however, close enough to the church we could see it and its flock of seekers corralled under the sycamores down a narrow side street, Anne reached across—here I was overcome by the smell of her shampoo in her newly-washed, still damp, fair-and-not-yet-graying hair, and her perfume, a French name with two accents, one of each, ague and grave, and several “e’s”—and honked the horn, throwing our too-cool-for-school Kate into a full-on, rolling fit of hysterics.

Sunspots

There have been sunspots lately and we have been lucky to pick up stations from from the Midwest and New England, getting the news from the Grapefruit League and from all over, even a station that Anne (who took Spanish at Chapel Hill and volunteers legal services to a local community of migrant workers) swore was from Matamoros. This morning, nothing too exotic: WBRF out of Gretna, streaming gospel and old time music, and prompting a nearly instant spout of sarcasm from Thomas in the back seat.

“AM radio, Paul?” he says. “Seriously, have you ever heard of digital?”

It is an unfortunate state of affairs that we are no longer, and haven’t been for some time, “Mom and Dad.” Kate started calling Anne and me by our first names when she was seven and thanks to our reluctance to discourage her precocious streak, the affectation has stuck, sadly, ever since, Perhaps the only thing to successfully stick with our youngest offspring.

I did Scouts with Thomas for three years, collecting badges and Jamboree-ing until we were blue in the face. We did slot car racing and ice hockey and archery, rocket ships, fingerprinting, photography, coin-collecting, cooking, radio building and even fly-tying using a sheaf of feathers Father Reynolds provided us from a recent pheasant shoot, but nothing seemed to grab on and hold. I did, however, get a decent short wave radio out of the deal and can now, on clear winter nights sitting by the fire place with a glass of Oban, pick up Stockholm, Montevideo, and Medicine Hat.

Then, in middle school, Thomas fell into music, and it has seemed to stay with him. I attribute his sustaining interest less to the music itself than to the many accoutrements that famously come with the territory: picks and strings and amplifiers and effects pedals, gear bags and cords, and of course the possibility of female attention. At the first sign of interest I offered him my old Martin dreadnought but he recoiled at the very sight of the acoustic guitar and after some haggling we agreed together to split the cost of a used Gibson electric.

Now he plays in a cover band (“Spyware”) and though the only song he knows all the way through from opening riff to bridge to coda is “Black Dog,” he is all about “fidelity.”

Fidelity of sound, I suppose, but not fidelity of feeling or fidelity of purpose. He has a ways to go before then.

“Dig-what, Sonny?” I use my best crotchety old-man voice and turn up the static and the old-time fiddle until I am afraid I will blow the speakers. Anne holds her ears; Kate, her nose. But “Rocky Top” never sounded so good.

“What’d you say? I can’t hear you; I must be going deef.”

“Whatever,” he says, and puts his nose back into his paperback book, a tell-all biography of an mostly unknown 1960s hard rock band from the Netherlands known to a select few connoisseurs for once upstaging Led Zeppelin in a tour incident involving a monkfish, a pair of Italian nuns and a water gun filled with booze.