Dressing Up by Maxine Swann

“Just in time for cocktails!” our mother’s mother, Gran, says, obviously exasperated, coming to meet us out on the drive. We were supposed to be there for lunch. Now, dressed in her cocktail clothes—white pants, a silk smock, gold shoes, and jewelry—after perfunctory kisses hello (she’s irritated) and the quickest sizing up of our mother’s boyfriend extricating himself from the car (he’s enormous, dwarfing our grandmother, covered with hair), she’s already heading back to the house. “I have a guest!” she says. Her step’s a little wobbly. She places her feet somewhat far apart. “He’s rich!” she calls over her shoulder. “Recently divorced!”

Our mother, her eyes already more squinted than usual, busies herself unloading the bags. We four kids pile out of the car. Clyde reels around on the pavement, his sweaty hair plastered to his face. He’s been sleeping. Lu has a headache because she’s been trying to read. She presses her palm to the side of her head. Tuck and I have been playing bloody knuckles. We both have one very sore hand. Each hauling a suitcase, we straggle inside.

We visit our grandmother twice a year, once in winter, once in summer. This is our summer visit, mid-July. Our grandmother’s house on Long Island is flat, one level, with red-tiled floors, and divided into adult and children’s quarters. In the children’s quarters are two bedrooms furnished with twin or bunk beds, above which hang sets of engravings of white men chasing Indians or the reverse. Lu and I, the oldest, always take the room with the twin beds covered with blue-and-white-striped bedcovers, while Tuck and Clyde are in the bunk beds.

For cocktails at our grandmother’s we always have to dress. This is by far the fanciest event in our lives. Lu and I open our suitcases and take out our best clothes. Our mother always brings her dress-up clothes, too, but they’re still hippie clothes. With our grandmother, she’s forever between obedience and rebellion. Is our mother’s boyfriend, Chester, going to change? We’ve never seen him wearing anything but what he has on now, blue jeans, a T-shirt, and lace-up boots. He keeps his hair in a ponytail. We first saw him speaking at anti-nuclear rallies, where they introduced him as Dr. Kemp. Even now when we hear him talking, his low full voice coming out of his beard, it sounds like he’s speaking into a microphone.

I put on my dress and sandals. Lu does, too. We look at ourselves in the mirror. As always, we’re worried that our grandmother will find us dirty or without manners or not dressed right.

There’s a step up into the part of the house where the adults reign, the dining room, with its gleaming appointments, the living room, the bedrooms further back. The kitchen is hidden away, shunned, like in a restaurant. We never go there. Cocktails are served in the living room. Everything is slick and polished, the cocktail table, the cocktail tray. Our grandmother doesn’t own particularly valuable things. What she can’t abide by are nicks and stains. Anything nicked or stained is quickly thrown away. Two porcelain elephants stand by the fireplace. Through the living room windows, you can look out and see the swimming pool, shaped like a kidney. To one side of the pool is a dog kennel filled with spotted hunting dogs.

Kneeling on the floor, dressed in our fancy clothes, we gobble down all the hors d’oeuvres, scallops wrapped in bacon, tiny sausages in rolls, shrimp dipped in cocktail sauce, clams on the half shell.

“My Gawd!” our grandmother says, in her mid-Atlantic drawl, having looked away and then back to find the plates empty. She, as usual, is horrified at our appetites.

Our mother and her boyfriend sit on the couch. Our mother wears an Indian dress with fringes on it. Chester has put on a button-down shirt. He’s not a drinker but a pot smoker—he grows his own plants—but he’s taken a gin and tonic all the same. Our mother has one, too. Suddenly, after admiring our grandmother’s slender gold cocktail shoes, I glance down and see our mother’s feet, her toenails full of dirt from working in the garden. I look up quickly at our grandmother’s face. Has she seen?

Our grandmother lights a cigarette.

“Alec was a star athlete at Princeton,” she says, referring to her guest.

Alec laughs. He has a straight, perfectly shaped nose. He’s debonair, just what our grandmother likes, a man who drinks cocktails, wears clean, pressed clothes, combs his pressed wet-looking hair back from his forehead. “You put the left-hand shot in the right-hand corner,” he says.

Our mother’s squinted gaze is just polite. Of course we know that she’d never like this man, not in a million years. But our grandmother doesn’t see it.

Chester leans forward, taking a long abrupt sip of the drink he doesn’t want.

This gives me an idea. “Gran,” I say, when she gets back, “can we have Shirley Temples?” She’s the person who introduced us to Shirley Temples.

“Of course, darling. Alec, fix the children Shirley Temples.”

Alec gets up quickly to oblige.

“We were just talking about the Jockey Club when you arrived, Faye,” our grandmother says. “It seems your old beau Roger has been trying to get in.”

“Of course we didn’t let him,” Alec says. The cocktail tray has wheels. He’s standing in front of it, back turned, fixing our drinks.

“Why not?” our mother asks.

“Well,” Alec says, turning, “to start with he’s an activist.”

“An activist?” our mother says. She laughs. “Since when is Roger an activist?” She turns to Chester. “You should see this guy.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Alec says, as if mildly embarrassed, addressing Chester. “Because you, I understand, are the real thing.”

Chester smiles, dryly amused.

“Chester also does research,” our mother says. “He’s a radiation chemist.” It’s not clear what she means, where she’s heading with this. She looks irritated, distracted, as if she herself doesn’t know what she wants.

“Oh, really? What sort of research?” Alec asks, distributing the Shirley Temples. I eat my cherry right away. Lu dunks hers, turning her whole glass rosy.

“Radiation tests. We study the effects of radiation, even low-level radiation, on thyroid function and mental development. The results are indisputable, not to mention the higher rates of infant mortality, miscarriages, and deaths by cancer in areas surrounding a nuclear power plant.”

“Gawd.” Our grandmother finds anything to do with study or the academic life profoundly boring. She holds out her glass to Alec. Her drink is a bullshot, beef broth, Worcestershire sauce, vodka, and lime. Alec’s drinking the same. Still at the bar, he refreshes both their glasses.

“We’re not even talking about accidents here,” Chester goes on. “That’s a whole other story. But of course it’s all covered up. The figures the government was spouting following the Three Mile Island meltdown were way off.”

“They left,” our grandmother says to Alec, the judgment clear but unspoken behind the words. “Faye took the children out of school.”

It was actually Chester who came in the middle of the day to take us out of school. He said there had been an accident at a nuclear power plant not far away and we had to get out of there fast. At home, our mother told us to pack a few things we really loved, because we might not ever come back to this house again.

“Why wouldn’t we?” Lu asked. She was wearing by chance that day her “Stop Nuclear Power” T-shirt.

“Because,” our mother said, “we don’t know what’s going to happen. We’ll just have to see.”

I couldn’t think of what to bring. I looked through the things I had—my terrarium? my cactus plants? I packed some polished rocks. They didn’t take much room. I could hold all four of them in the palm of my hand.

It was a hasty departure. Within an hour we were gone.

“Hold your breath,” Lu said, as we were going out to the car.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the air’s poisonous now.”

I held my breath between the front door and the car.

We drove south with our mother. Chester, not trusting the official meters, stayed behind to take radiation readings downwind of the plant. He would join us when he was done. The landscape was unfamiliar, Maryland, green horse pastures, white fences, Virginia. As we drove, we kept the radio on for news of the accident.

“Why aren’t the other kids at school leaving, too?” Tuck asked.

“Because they don’t know,” our mother said. “Nobody knows the truth. The government always lies about these things.” From the driver’s seat, she turned away, then back. “But everything might also be just fine.”

We drove all day. By nightfall, we had made it as far as Tennessee. We stopped in a little town at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, checked into a motel, and went to a restaurant to eat. In the restaurant, there was a row of deer heads with full antlers over the bar.

We all slept in one room in the motel, our mother and Lu in the bed, the rest of us on the floor in our sleeping bags. The next morning, when we stepped out, we saw that there was a plastic swimming pool in the parking lot with a high curved slide. We hadn’t noticed it the night before in the dark. Lu, Tuck, and I went over to look. But there was no water in the pool. Its sides were plastered with fallen brown leaves.

The days went by slowly. With the pool empty, there wasn’t much to do around the motel. In front of it were a parking lot and a road. In back was a fence and behind the fence a brick building. If you went around the other side, you saw that in the brick building were a sneaker shop and a liquor store. We loitered in the parking lot. We played cards. Our mother called Chester to tell him where we were. She listened to the radio and watched the news on the motel TV. It was funny to see our mother watching TV. We didn’t have a TV at our house. We kids also watched, hypnotized. But there was hardly any more news about the accident.

A week later, Chester joined us. He had been supposed to appear on TV himself, following the accident, but his appearance had been cancelled at the last minute when they found out what he was going to say. He made a lot of calls from the motel room. They were planning the next big anti-nuke rally, and he was going to speak.

We spoke to our father on the phone. Our mother took us on wildflower walks in the hills. A guide told us all about the mountain flowers. We were missing school. I worried about the tests I wasn’t taking and the prizes I would now never win. At night, lying on the floor in my sleeping bag, unable to sleep, I pictured our house perched on the hill, empty, its windows staring out. The trees around it were all dead, the creek below dry and brown.

But when we finally did come back, everything was still alive. The creek was rippling, the apple trees in bloom. The blossoms smelled sweet as ever. But were they poisoned? Would we be able to eat the fruit? I walked around looking, not touching things.

Our grandmother turns to Lu. “How long were you away from school?”

But Lu doesn’t budge. She’s on our mother’s side. She shrugs. Our grandmother, annoyed, turns to me.

“Three weeks,” I say.

“Three weeks!” she says, reporting, triumphant.

“Wasn’t that a bit alarmist?” Alec asks.

“Well, actually, no,” Chester says. “Not if you knew what was really going on.” He begins to recite figures. He looks gigantic, imperturbable. His voice is deep, far off, as if he were once again addressing crowds. The hors d’oeuvres are gone. Outside in the dark the pool is glowing. There are lights on the floor of it. I picture jumping in, the way the water jets stream out at you underneath the surface. It would be cool but not too cool. It would be nice to step out of our fancy clothes.

“Now Clyde,” our grandmother asks, “what would your favorite meal be?” We’ve moved into the dining room. The dining room table is made of dark polished wood. You can see the knots far beneath the polish gleaming. The silverware feels large and heavy in our hands. “Starting with the appetizer.” Although the food she serves is rich and delicious, a crabmeat appetizer, sole with potatoes seeped in butter, our grandmother eats almost nothing herself, a hard-boiled egg at lunchtime, a few bites at dinner. “You can choose both a meat and a fish.” Clyde doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “And then the dessert.” She hasn’t had dessert, we’ve heard, in thirty years. She used to be chubby, our mother tells us, when our mother was growing up, but since then our grandmother decided, with the same relentless determination with which she holds her opinions, never to be “fat” again.

“Pork chops,” Clyde says.

Lu starts laughing.

“Good for you,” Alec says. “A meat and potatoes man.” He seems to be drunker. There’s sweat on his brow. Both he and our grandmother have brought their drinks to the table.

Our grandmother turns to our mother. “So Faye, dear, tell us about the addition. Faye’s building a wonderful new addition,” she explains to Alec. “She’s been living for years with a dirt floor in the kitchen. Dirt! Can you imagine? You dropped an egg, and there it was. There was nothing to do but rub it into the dirt.” She rubs her gold sandal in a circle on the floor.

“I really enjoy the countryside,” Alec says to our mother. “I have a country place myself.”

“You do?” our mother asks.

“Sure! I like to go out walking or I shoot. I’ve got a little firing range set up.”

“You hunt?” our mother asks.

“No, not much. But I like to shoot.”

“That’s wonderful,” our grandmother says.

Our mother persists. “Why is that wonderful?”

She’s thinking of the hunters who come onto our land and who, one year, shot our dogs.

“Well, shooting is wonderful, of course!” our grandmother says. “Everyone should know how to shoot.”

Our grandmother has these implacable rules. Everyone should drink. A woman should marry rich. Everyone should know how to shoot. Sometimes in the afternoon she takes us out to shoot clay pigeons with her. She wears tan pants with leather bits sewn on them in the front. Standing there, her blond hair pulled back in a headband, she looks down the sights of her rifle, one eye squinted, and fires. Or she takes us to the horse races where we place bets. Once a visit we go with her to see her jeweler. We peer out into the yard by the pool to see if our mother wants to come. But she’s not interested. She never wears jewelry, anyway. We’re all dressed up, the best we can do, to go out with our grandmother. “Bye, Faye,” our grandmother calls. What’s our mother doing? Is she digging up the plants? Is she painting? She has her easel set up, so she must be painting. Her hands are dirty. She wears cutoff shorts. She has paint on her legs. Although in our normal life our mother is always dressed like this and always outdoors working with her hands, in this moment we look at her from where we’re standing by the glass door with our grandmother’s implacable gaze. Why doesn’t our mother clean herself up, wear some decent clothes? It’s an embarrassment. What’s she thinking, behaving like this?

Our grandmother’s car is dark green and shiny, with monograms on the doors. Once in town, we follow her, tap-tap, along the sidewalk. She wears beautifully cut pants, low flat shoes. She’s tan—she always seems to be tan—and smells of perfume. We’re allowed to choose something, a stone for a pendant, nothing too precious, or maybe a watch. Then we follow her, tap-tap, back along the sidewalk to the car.

We’re just finishing the chocolate mousse. They’re talking about our aunt’s wedding, our mother’s sister, the second time around, which we all went to a month or so ago. “Why couldn’t they just have a normal wedding?” our grandmother asks. “Hmm? A normal wedding, a lovely white cake?”

The wedding was outside, and our mother acted as priest. She stood with two tall reeds stuck in the ground on either side of her. Then everyone sat down in a circle on the ground. A musician played the sitar. A woman in a green dress, our aunt’s best friend, sang.

Our mother stiffens. She doesn’t say anything. Then she does. “Because they didn’t want that, Mum.”

Our grandmother looks at her, as if not understanding. Blank, child eyes. The thing is not understandable.

Chester is quiet. This is what happens when he starts to get in a bad mood. He has a dry sort of humor when he’s feeling all right, but when he gets in a bad mood he turns silent. He sinks further and further, often not speaking for days. Our mother stays clear of him and tells us to, too.

Our grandmother turns to Alec. “And then they served pasta.” She says “pasta” with a short a, like “cat.”

“What’s wrong with pasta?” Alec asks, already amused.

Our grandmother takes another sip of her drink. She has that light in her eyes. This is when she starts getting outrageous. “What’s wrong with it? What is it? Flour and water, flour and water!”

Alec laughs appreciatively.

Chester gets up from the table. “Excuse me,” he says and leaves.

Alec turns and smiles at our mother, raising his glass. “The face that launched a thousand ships,” he says.

Our mother’s flattered. She can’t help it. Having grown up in a house with girls—her father died young—she can never get enough attention from men.

“You should see Faye’s work,” our grandmother says. “She’s a marvelous painter.”

What our mother won’t do, though, is please her mother. She stands up abruptly to clear the plates.

“No, no, Faye, leave it,” our grandmother says.

I’ve been thinking again about the pool. I can tell Tuck and Lu have been eyeing it, too. Now Tuck asks what’s in all our heads. “Mom, can we go swimming?”

Back in our rooms, we shed our fancy clothes as fast as we can and pull on our bathing suits. Racing each other, we dash back through the house, out the sliding glass doors, and jump into the pool. The jets along the sides shoot out silver bubbles. It’s bright blue, deliciously cool. Tuck and Clyde play with the jets. Lu likes to dive down and skim the bottom.

Soon we’re taking turns climbing out of the pool, running, and doing dives or leaps of different kinds. I step behind a set of low bushes, thinking I’ll add a variation by leaping over the bushes and then taking my dive. But there’s something there in the dark, a long shape on the grass. It’s a person, Chester, lying down. He’s smoking a joint, looking up at the sky. He turns his head and sees me, but doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything, either.

A little while later, our grandmother and Alec step out of the house, fresh drinks in hand. Our grandmother, it seems, is on a roll.

“Charles Manson was a sex symbol, of course he was!”

Alec’s delighted. “But Rosie, really, how can you say that?”

“It’s obvious! Just look at all those beautiful gurls he had.”

Alec, chortling, totters over to pee in the bushes.

Our mother comes outside, too, and looks around for Chester. She calls out his name.

Suddenly Chester gets up, right near where Alec is peeing—I can see his dark towering shape—and, silent and furious, walks away.

Our mother starts to follow him, but Alec, returning, cuts her off. Shirt untucked, standing on the flagstones around the pool, he does a little dance step in front of her. “The one-step, two-step Fred Astaire,” he says.

Our grandmother laughs, her whole body collapsing entirely, charmingly, the way our mother’s does, too, when she laughs. But our mother’s not laughing now. She looks confused. It’s as if she can’t afford the luxury of frolicking. She wants a world where things mean something.

The night air has turned cool.

“I’m going to ask,” Lu says to me, shivering. Beside her, Clyde is clinging to the edge of the pool, teeth chattering.

Our grandmother and Alec are now sitting at an iron table out on the flagstones. Lu pulls herself up out of the water and walks over to them.

“The face that launched a thousand ships,” Alec says as she arrives.

“Gran,” Lu says, ignoring him, “can we take a bath?”

“Of course, darling,” our grandmother says.

Dripping and shivering, the four of us follow our grandmother into the house. She walks ahead of us jerkily, placing her feet far apart. We pass the kitchen, then bedrooms, going further and further into the adult side. At the far end is the bathroom, tiled in salmon-pink tile, the seat in our minds of all the mysterious glamorous magic that goes on in this house. One half of it consists of the bathtub itself, enormous, step-in, square, and deep. All four of us can fit into it easily at once. On a counter below the mirror are perfume bottles of different shapes with different shades of gold liquid inside, Mary Chess (“French,” our grandmother says, her hand on the bottle, “very hard to find”), Opium, Chanel No. 5. To one side there’s a bidet that intrigues us. Later, once our grandmother’s gone, we’ll play with it, spraying it up, the sudden flowering burst of cold between your legs. Along one wall hang lacy white nightgowns, dozens, it seems, soaked in perfume. Our grandmother puts the bath water on and pours in bubble bath. She turns and picks out two of the nightgowns. “Here, gurls, these are for you.”

Later, waterlogged after hours in the pool, another long hour in the bath, dizzy with the smell of our perfume-soaked nightgowns, our stomachs gorged with rich food, Lu and I lie in our twin beds with the engravings of white men chasing Indians hanging above us on the wall.

Our mother comes in in her dress with fringes. The lamp is out, but there’s light coming through the doorway. Chester has already gone to bed. In the background, out again by the pool, we can still hear Alec’s voice. “You put the left-hand shot in the right-hand corner.” Our mother sits down. She’s about to say something, but then we hear our grandmother in the corridor.

“Faye, are you there?”

Our mother hesitates for a second. “Yeah, here, Mum.”

Our grandmother appears in the bedroom doorway. “Oh,” she says. She teeters there for a second, awkwardly, as if she might come in, but no one invites her. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” our mother says.

“All right, then.” Our grandmother, hesitating, turns away.

Our mother waits for a moment. Stiff, girl-like, in her Indian dress, she’s sitting on the edge of my bed, but looking over at Lu, really talking to her. “She never, not once, tried to understand us,” she says. “Why did she never once try to understand us?