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.

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.