In the house on the Esplanade, home to three toddlers, then three preschoolers, then three primary-school-aged children, the only time our mother heard the sound of kids at play was when one of her children had a friend over. Otherwise: silence in the basement playroom with its puppet theater and cupboards full of board games and arsenals of foam weapons for active children to hurl at one another, silence in the bedrooms and in the living room, where she not infrequently came across a child with a book or art project or solo game. Her home was quiet—so quiet—with not even the shared quiet of a video they all liked down on the basement couch, or the companionable quiet of concurrent reading. When they gathered for a meal conversation might be made, grudgingly, and light chores could be jointly undertaken without too much complaint, but at the first opportunity they parted again, to tend to homework or activities or recreation, and to think separate thoughts about who knew what.
Our mother, who had willed her children into existence (and suffered mightily along the way), would not give up her notion of what they might be. She grew adept at deflecting the “observations” of others—parents on the playground who joked about how the triplets steered clear of one another, or their teachers at Walden, who took some strange delight in describing the children’s intra-aversion in parent-teacher meetings. Even her own mother had a way of tut-tutting through her rare visits, whenever Sally, Lewyn, and Harrison declined to do something adorable together. So maybe the true, deep bond her children had for one another just wasn’t registering in an obvious way, or was something only a mother could possibly intuit. So when Harrison called Lewyn fat and Sally put Harrison’s chess medal (which came not from Walden, where everyone got a medal, but from the Brooklyn Chess League, where you actually had to win in order to get a medal) in the garbage, or Lewyn didn’t want to share his puzzle with the other two, or Harrison lifted not one finger to help his brother conquer homesickness at summer camp, or Sally refused to agree to any movie or television show that Harrison wanted to watch (even if she also wanted to watch it), simply because Harrison wanted to watch it—our mother refused to attach great importance to any of these things, because on some deep, deep level, where it counted, she maintained the fragile notion that all three of her children were devoted to one another. And besides, close intimacy in childhood was no indicator of close intimacy in the fullness of time, which was much more important! (She herself had once been close to her elder sister Debbie, but now Debbie had her own life with Bruce and their boys, and the sisters hardly ever saw each other.)
Into this void Johanna poured routines and rituals—so many routines and so many rituals! Breakfast parfaits and walking to school one way in the morning and home from school another way in the afternoon, stopping at the same bodega for Snapple and OJ, building a family cookbook of recipes they voted on, and taking turns to choose the restaurant on Sunday nights. Disney movies at the Cobble Hill Cinema, stops at Lenny and Joe’s on the drive to the Vineyard, the Flying Horses with the brass ring dispenser in Oak Bluffs. She had patchwork quilts made of their baby and kid clothes, so they’d remember. She took Sally for Saturday-morning pedicures and marched Lewyn and Harrison across the Brooklyn Bridge to buy roast-pork buns in Chinatown. On their birthday she took those photographs on the back porch of the Vineyard cottage, and hung them along the staircase wall in Brooklyn so they could see themselves grow up together every time they went upstairs. But if she faltered, even once—one Sunday, one birthday photo, one route home after school—not one of them seemed to notice, let alone care.
When they were six, they departed Walden’s nursery school building and entered the Lower School on Joralemon Street, where, for the first time, the three of them were assigned to separate first-grade homerooms and given individual class schedules. The transition would certainly be destabilizing, so our mother set out to prepare her kids, reminding them that the important thing was the comfort and strength of what they shared. She delivered solemn sermons to them over dinner as they approached this traumatic separation, and took them out separately to allay any fears. Harrison she brought to the bookstore on Court Street, treating him to a stack of books; Sally she took to a special lunch at Serendipity. Lewyn got a private walk on the beach, a few days before they left the island that summer. And when the momentous morning arrived, she woke them with excitement and pancakes and asked Salo to go in late to the office so they could walk the kids together, and all the way there she fretted over the approaching moment when two parents would somehow have to divide three children, leaving one or two or all three vulnerable to feelings of abandonment. Harrison was clearly the strongest of the three, so they would all accompany him to his homeroom and leave him, and that would be that. Then she and Salo would split up to take Sally to hers and Lewyn to his, and not leave any of them until each was truly okay. But when they got to the building that morning, the sidewalk and hallways were packed with first-day parents and caregivers and kids, and her boys suddenly announced that they knew where they were supposed to be, and walked off without a backward glance. Only Sally consented to be accompanied to her new classroom, and Johanna couldn’t help wondering whether there might be an element of actual pity in the gesture.
When they were nine, all three of them went off to camp in Maine, but only Harrison lasted past the first year. Harrison loved Androscoggin, and would spend many summers there, piling up badges and honors, assembling a pack of admiring buddies, and mastering the arcane skills of the canoe before defecting to CTY at Johns Hopkins, to be with other teenagers who knew what “Supply Side Economics” meant. For Lewyn, though, it was a torment from the moment his parents returned to the car. Oppressed by homesickness, scratching at rashes from plants and insects and sheer anxiety, and only occasionally managing to kick a ball or tie a knot, Lewyn failed to do manly things in the wilderness with the other boys, and begged to spend his summers on the Vineyard with his mother and Sally (who’d also defected, without explanation, after a single Pinecliffe summer).
And then came the September morning when her children, who were no longer children by then, entered the storied stone building that housed Walden’s middle and upper schools, and marched off to their separate sixth-grade homerooms for the first time, each having asked Johanna not to accompany them. She had stood on the sidewalk, looking after them as they went inside, and then wandered home to her quiet house to spend the day wondering what she was supposed to be doing with herself. Climbing the stairs, she watched the three of them grow up in those magical birthday photographs, just as she had done thousands of times before, but this time she stopped in front of the picture she had hung only days before. Three individuals forcing rictus smiles, waiting for the shutter to click so they could each return to whatever it was they’d been summoned from. Johanna felt herself sit heavily on that top step to the landing, near a spot on the wall that had indeed, as her husband once predicted, borne the brunt of innumerable book bags and backpacks.
Finally, finally, the tiniest pinprick of reality came through the force field of her stubborn delusion, presenting Johanna with the first filament of an idea. That they were two adults plus three children, made concurrently. That they were five humans cohabiting. That they were not, and never had been, a family.
And her husband, what was more, while she hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention, had slipped past them all and disappeared—not in terms of his physical self, of course, though his physical self came home later and later each night, after longer and longer visits to his warehouse in Coney Island or Red Bank or wherever it was—but his attentive self, his essential self, which by then lived somewhere else entirely.
Chapter Six
Outsider
In which Salo Oppenheimer remembers some additional injuries, and ceases to tumble
One January afternoon in 1993, Salo Oppenheimer walked into something called the Outsider Art Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, and looked around for his wife.