Some days I felt perfectly at peace with the simplicity of my life on Crete, and yet there were other days when my body and my mind seemed at odds, when I longed for the intellectual stimulation I’d left behind in London, the city’s frenetic sense of potential, even as the possibility of returning to that other life receded.
The change in me happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the leftover summer snow thawing on Crete’s distant peaks. It happened incrementally, taking hold as we traversed the arid landscape past tiny white chapels dotting the hillsides; or strolled along beaches fiercely drifted by the sirocco winds, our sun hats skipping across the sand in front of us, our skin whipped and welted. Somewhere inside the casual rhythm of our days, I began to understand: not just that my entire life would change, but that it had to. I needed more substance, less abstraction; more space in which to move around emotionally and physically; and fewer hang-ups about money, fewer preconceptions. I would somehow find the way to depend on myself, rather than others. While in my work, I would benefit perhaps from a medium in which to deal with real events and real feelings—filmmaking, say, or writing.
After Greece, Arkady and I lived around the world for almost two years—New York, Kauai, Turkey, Kauai again—before settling back in San Francisco, where I had just finished my first short story. I had also been trading technology stocks and doing remarkably well, capitalizing on the crazy possibility of the dot-com era, while helping Arkady establish his yoga business. We were talking about getting married and having a baby, so . . . the time felt right now to bring him home.
The contrast with Detroit as we drove into Grosse Pointe was more striking than ever. Immaculate houses suddenly lined the wide boulevards. The upscale shopping villages were flanked with Noah’s Bagels, Brooks Brothers, and Talbots. Mercedes and BMWs lined the streets, a clear sign that even the locals no longer bothered to buy American.
“Where’s the Whole Foods?” asked Arkady after we’d passed the A&P market.
“There isn’t one,” I told him. “We’ll have to drive out to Troy tomorrow for the turkey.” I didn’t attempt to explain the differences between old money and new money in suburban Detroit, or the fact that the old money Grosse Pointers would rather simply dine at their clubs than bother stocking their kitchens with locally sourced produce.
But Arkady planned to make a totally organic Thanksgiving-style dinner for my family the following day. It was March. By this point, my family rarely gathered over the holidays, and always without Charlie. We had to seize the moment, Arkady felt.
“I can’t believe Charlie’s going to be there,” I mused. “He hasn’t come home in seven years.” Not since the Christmas just after I’d filmed the family piece.
“It will be great for you to see him,” Arkady said. “Family is so important.”
Like Detroit itself, Charlie had declined even further in recent years. After Bobby moved away from Dallas—first to Grosse Pointe, and then Tortola—Charlie got into crack and other hard drugs. Unable to hold down a job, he no longer even tried to. To keep him off the streets, my parents had appointed Bill Penner as Charlie’s trustee. It was Bill who paid the bills: rent, utilities, food, travel; Bill who controlled where Charlie went and what he did; and Bill who had succeeded, until now, at convincing Charlie to stay away from Grosse Pointe. Legally, my parents and Bill could not keep Charlie out of a shareholder meeting.
Arkady ran his hand over his shaved head. “Of all your brothers, Charlie will be my favorite,” he said. “I know it.”
My mother sat at the kitchen table knitting while Arkady stuffed the goose (there were no organic turkeys to be had in Michigan in March) and I peeled potatoes at the sink. My mother’s hair by now had gone completely gray, and her back was hunched from all the years of bending over backgammon tables and knitting projects—and she was bending over her knitting right now, in fact. The knitting needles clicked rhythmically to the hum of the dishwasher just as the dice and backgammon pieces had once clicked across sun-warmed corkboard at the club. Did my mother use the basic rhythm in these activities as an antidote to anxiety? I wondered.
“Charlie can be at the house for dinner,” she said. “But he’ll have to stay at a hotel. His seedy friends have put him up to this, I know. The poor thing, getting sent here by those grubs to get his hands on some money.”
Arkady shot me an alarmed look, whereas I’d grown so used to my parents’ callousness toward Charlie, I barely shrugged.
“Maybe Charlie, you know, just wants to come home,” I offered. “It’s been years since he’s seen us.” Charlie and I often talked by phone. Recently, he had confided in me that he had hepatitis C. My parents knew about this, too, but it had not changed their attitude toward him.