That was our father’s most earnest admonition to his family—Please don’t catastrophize. This was an entirely made-up word, we would one day discover. And it did not—ever—apply to our father himself.
Dad operated within so tightly wound and so intricately structured a schedule, nearly always running late, fleeing phone calls, searching for mislaid car keys, wallet, sometimes even his shoes, he could not bear the anxieties of others in addition to his own.
It was sharp-eyed Darren who’d discovered just that morning that the inspection sticker on the Chevy station wagon was outdated by five months. With grim-gleeful reproach he’d run to tell our mother that she was in danger of getting a ticket, possibly getting arrested, driving without a valid 1997 sticker issued by the Michigan Department of Motor Vehicles—“You or Dad better take the car to get inspected, fast!”
Dad had his own, newer car, that is his pre-owned 1993 Volvo, and Mom had inherited the 1991 Chevy station wagon for her full-time use. Thus responsibility for the station wagon had fallen between the two adults like a ball indifferently dropped, rolling heedlessly about at their feet, unacknowledged.
The original plan for the day had been to meet Dad for lunch at one o’clock at a lakeshore restaurant called The Cove, which was our parents’ new favorite restaurant, overlooking Lake Huron five miles north of our house; Dad would be driving to The Cove from the center of St. Croix, a distance of two miles. That morning, however, without consulting him, Mom had conceived of a “brilliant—and pragmatic” new idea: we would drive to St. Croix and drop the station wagon off at a garage, and we would walk the short distance to the women’s center where Gus Voorhees was physician-in-chief, and surprise him—“You kids never see your father at work. You deserve that.” Then, Mom reasoned, our father would drive us all to The Cove, and by the time we returned from lunch, in the early afternoon, the station wagon would be ready to be picked up at the garage.
Of course, prissy Darren objected to this plan on two grounds: it was a change of plans, which seemed to nettle him on principle; and, what if our father left for The Cove before we got to the women’s center, how would we get to the restaurant?
“Don’t be ridiculous, Darren. We’ll get to the Center by twelve-thirty. Your father won’t leave for the restaurant until at least quarter to one. Gus Voorhees has never been early for anything, and he isn’t likely to start today.”
“I think you’d better call Dad anyway.”
“Your father doesn’t like nuisance calls at work. We’ll just surprise him.”
“It isn’t a nuisance call. It’s us!”
“Your father doesn’t like unnecessary calls. He’s a busy man.”
“But—what if he leaves early for the Cove?”
Brainless as a parrot my brother was repeating himself. And so grim was he presenting these superficial objections, our mother laughed at him. How could that possibly happen! Why was he being so silly! There was something edgy and provocative in our mother’s laughter like the scratching of fingernails on a blackboard.
“But—but—what if the station wagon isn’t ready to be picked up when we’re back from lunch? How’ll we get home?”—this was Darren’s fumbling coup de grace.
“‘How will we get home?’—Darren, we live three miles away. There will always be a way to get home.”
In the rearview mirror our mother’s eyes flashed at us in warning yet still she was smiling. Her mood was cheery, ebullient.
How beautiful she seemed, to us! Before the ravaging.
Mom said that if the station wagon wasn’t ready when we returned from lunch, we could wait in the public library—“I want to go there anyway, to pick up a book. It may not be Ann Arbor but the library isn’t bad.”
So frequently our mother would preface a wistful remark with It may not be Ann Arbor but . . .
We’d lived in Ann Arbor long ago. To me, a lifetime ago.
Darren scornfully refuted most of my memories of Ann Arbor as mistaken, fraudulent. Especially I was eager to recall a place and a time where (we all knew, she hardly disguised her feelings) my mother had been happier. I had been born—(that is, I’d been told so)—at the University of Michigan Medical School Hospital where at the time Gus Voorhees was a physician on the staff; soon afterward, he shifted his interests to another kind of medical care, public health, community-oriented, female-centered, and we moved away. Of Ann Arbor I could remember little clearly except a vast, hilly park of hiking trails to which I’d been taken as a small child in a backpack on my father’s back—the excitement of those hikes, a pleasurable jolting like being rocked in a cradle, seeing the park spread out astonishingly before my eyes even as, so strangely, I was being carried backward . . .