A Notion of Pelicans Page 3

  Pelican Church.

  People say Lavinia’s pelicans never left. Some claim to have seen them, or to have seen one—a single pelican, in the distance or overhead, watching, then sometimes right up close. Is it possible? Is it one of the pelicans? I don’t know. I’d like if it were. People try, we try so hard, to find something, a connection— human, maybe, or divine—and we mess up. Boy, do we mess up. What I do know is that, because of those pelicans, a lot of lives have been affected, in good ways, when they’ve most needed it.

  In the early days, the church stood alone above the lake, with what’s now the downtown area below it. As settlers arrived, they built up the hill and into the area around the church. People have always found its name odd and interesting. They’ve been intrigued by Lavinia’s notion of pelicans on a mission for God. Over the years there have been—well, nobody knows— countless commemorations of the birds’ visit, from t-shirts to art. After the Second World War, a couple celebrating their golden anniversary commissioned a metal sculptor from the South Shore to create a pelican wind vane out of copper. It was mounted above the vestibule door in the spring of 1947. Ever since, the little fellow has looked out over worshippers as they come up the walk. The Property Board, affectionately known as the Pelican Polishers, hasn’t been up there in a while, and he’s turned a little green from rain. He stands there, jaunty as all get-out, with one wing slightly raised and his short legs straddling the peak of the roof—the north, south, east, and west symbols beneath his feet slightly out of kilter, his spinning and pointing registering some perpetually wrong direction.

  I spend time with Lavinia often. Out in a cemetery, I find relief.

  Truth is, there are days I’d like to secede from the human race. What with working more now that the kids are in college— I clerk the front counter at the Assessor’s Office and there’s no fully explaining the pleasure that is—what with the unglamorous duty of running the house, the . . . the tedium of being the pastor’s wife, I can be, on any given day, crushed. Lord help me if I forget I promised to bake bars for some meeting. The flinty irritation or bruised hope in people’s eyes makes me leave the meeting inches shorter than when I arrived.

  Lately, I’ve been hanging by my nails from the empty nest. Scott and Andy are worldly sophomore men this year, back home at Houghton Tech, and Chelsey went off this fall to be educated by the Lutherans. Taking the boys to Houghton wasn’t as hard as taking Chelsey to Concordia. Chelsey’s a PK, through and through, a preacher’s kid—more than the boys. I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or scary. There are so many pressures on clergy kids, which she’s handled to this point, but she is in the throes of growing up, and I worry that on her own she’ll cross some irrevocable bound. When I think back to my own college years—well, there’s this flush of heat. It’s been perplexing as a parent as to how to guide my kids to safe water, without pretending I didn’t take my own canoe through some whirlpools at her age. Chelsey’s not at a hotbed of sex and radical thinking . . . still, a lot changes in those years.

  The day we left her at school, she was buoyant with life, all hopefulness and light beneath her golden freshman beanie. Her eyes were wide, so dark like Richard’s, her freckles muted by foundation but still discernible and precious. She modeled the beanie for us, and I couldn’t hide a smile. Well, more a smirk.

  “Okay,” she conceded. “It looks dorky.”

  “More like we’re three years old,” spat her roommate, Merope.

  Merope, a girl with a nest of unnaturally black hair, had come up from deep in a book. The look she had going was half Beat poet, half urban punk. It looked odd with her baby face. She . . . she unnerved me. I was going to leave my little girl with . . . this?

  “You don’t like your beanie, Merope?” I asked. Running through my mind was: Merope. Merope Moffitt-Smith. People make some dumb-ass decisions. No wonder the girl is scary. Who would give their child a name like that, a name she’ll be fighting all her life?

  Chelsey had recognized in the question my propensity, inherited from my mother, to egg people on. She doesn’t share it— she’s a chip off her father’s block. “Mo-o-o-o-m-m,” she said. She drew it out, warning me off by giving my name extra syllables.

  “Yellow. Ugh,” croaked Merope.

  “Not yellow, gold,” Chelsey said. She said it gently—she also has her father’s way with people. “Merope,” she added, “the color looks great on you.”

  Of course, in Chelsey’s estimation just now, I’m in a different sphere than the rest of the world. She isn’t shy about letting me know she thinks my status as a mother gives me a compromised grasp on higher things—I hate to think of the hard fall that’s ahead for her, when she has kids of her own. She said, “We wear the beanies because we’re part of something. You just don’t get some things, Mom.”

  She was so earnest. I said, “I can’t dispute that, I guess, or your father will step in and offer state’s evidence.”

  “Church and state,” Richard said, shaking his head. “Better they don’t mix.”

  Chelsey hates when we banter at her expense. She gave us a look of exasperation and said, “I’m serious here. This beanie is . . . it’s . . . well, it’s tradition. It’s got . . . meaning.”

  Richard took her side. He usually will. “Don’t let your mother rile you, pumpkin. Enjoy your beanie, then store it somewhere safe, because as you get older, that dorky hat and everything it stands for will only get more meaningful.”

  Chelsey sent an unspoken Thanks, Daddy that lit her father up. Merope Moffitt-Smith glanced into the mirror as she adjusted her beanie, then went back to her book with a low huffing sound.

  Not long after, I’d done an about-face. The thought of driving away and leaving our baby girl was opening hairline fractures in my heart. Chelsey had gotten a primo room, in the dorm she wanted, a room she’d prayed for and sweated blood over. I looked around it. Starfish and sea horses floated across the crisp blue ocean of the comforter on her bed. Red towels and washcloths—she’d chosen red, she said, to enter her new life with flair—blazed on a corner of the desk, and the textbooks and notebooks purchased that afternoon glowed with potential next to them. But there in the midst of the new possessions, the signs and symbols of Chelsey the grownup, sat flop-eared, frayed-at the-joints TooBoo, the teddy bear she’d lugged around since she was two. His brown, threadbare butt was planted securely in the middle of her pillow.

  That did it. Fortunately, Merope had gone out for pizza with a young man sporting one earring and an orange mohawk. Something tight, full, and hot surged up the back of my throat and out my eye sockets. Chelsey’s flooded, too. “Mom,” she said—one syllable, all forgiven. “Don’t. Don’t make this hard.”

  “Who’s making it hard? It’s hard by definition.”

  Chelsey flailed across the space between us. “I’m going to miss you so much,” she said. “I miss you already.” Her warm, narrow, strong frame pressed into me, and I was filled with something like the awe I felt the first time her small redness lay squirming and burning on my chest.

  “I miss you, too. I mean, I miss my little girl. But I’ll be fine, and so will you.”

  With the two of us blubbering like we were, Richard almost lost it. A weird sort of spasm crossed his face, and he stared intently at an invisible something hanging in the air. His voice struggling—God help a man if his voice should break—he said in that gruff tone he seems to use more and more, “It’s late, Rena. If we’re going to be home before breakfast, we need to get on the road.”

  We walked to the car through this lonesome, searching wind blowing off the prairie. I cried half the drive home. It’s been a couple months, and I’m still not feeling right. I stop, I listen, I think. Why aren’t the tremulous tones of Lisa Loeb filling the house, all hours of day and night? Chelsey is crazy for Lisa Loeb. She’ll play “Stay” over and over until we tell her to stop. All of a sudden—all at once—Richard and I were left with just each other. It had started to dawn on me, alr
eady last year when the boys left, that maybe being the two of us again wasn’t going to be easy. It was nothing I could put my finger on. Then Richard got his pants on fire, and not over me.

  When my parents chose my first name, they hit way off-mark. I try to live up to what “Serena” implies, but I don’t. My friends tell me that from the outside I look as if I am—serene. But I know better. I may appear placid on the outside, but I’m roiling on the inside. If I live to be ninety, I’ll never understand. The name thing again. What would prompt someone to give their child a name like that, to be a stone around the neck?

  When I was ten, I’d had enough of it.

  At the table one night—and it was night, since Mom liked to think of us as East Coast, and East Coast eats later—I caught my folks off-guard. It was one of those moments where nobody is talking. Knives and forks were scratching across our plates in imitation of conversation. My mother can get a bit intense, a quality I guess I inherited. To avoid being derailed over food in my mouth, I swallowed and said, “Pops. Mom. I don’t like my name.” They both turned and stared at me, mid-bite. “I want you to call me Rena,” I said.

  They exchanged a glance, the sort Richard and I have come to know well ourselves since we’ve been parents. Pops laughed, one of those what’s this? laughs, and Mom placed her tableware down. A person will always notice my mother’s tableware technique. Since our trip to England, the summer I was seven, she has held her utensils European-style—fork in the left, knife in the right. She dabbed her napkin to her lips.

  “Very helpful, dear,” she said to my father. Theirs is a marriage based on a battle of wills and ways. “As for you, Serena, eat your liver. Then maybe we’ll discuss it.”

  “Now, Serena,” Pops said. “You know you have my grandmother’s name.” His left eyebrow lifted hopefully. “Hers is that little portrait on the wall of Gram’s sewing room. The oval miniature that will be yours someday.”

  “Howard,” Mom said, taking her utensils up. “Don’t bargain with your child.”

  Pops wasn’t going to drop it. “It’s a beautiful name. A family name. You should be honored that of all the women in the Capshaw family, you carry it. Rena sounds—” He stumbled, first for lack of words, then because, like me, he’d seen the look that had moved across my mother’s face. It wasn’t ominous, but imminent. “It sounds,” he continued, “like . . . like somewhere you go to gamble.”

  “Or divorce,” Mom said. She’d decided early in life that her birth on the Iron Range had resulted from a wrong turn on the part of her delivering stork. She popped liver wrapped in onion into her mouth, chewed seven times, swallowed, and followed with a single sip of burgundy. She’s a little tightly wrapped.

  “So they say,” Pops said. He held his martini glass aloft—his third of the night, by my count—and said, “Serena, pass me the spuds.”

  My folks are rare for their generation. They’re both college graduates. Pops studied engineering. Mom double-majored in English and psychology. They’re pretty much mismatched, and come by their adversarial relationship honestly. What I know of their college days makes campuses in those years sound damn amazing. I’d like to have been at one. The GIs had just come home—battle-honed hard-asses moving into dorms with freshmen right off the farm. During the war, Pops was in the military police. He’s proud of having served, justifiably. He’s also interestingly proud of the way, once back in the States, he and his GI friends intimidated the R.A. on their floor.

  “I’d heaved guys bigger than me into the slammer, all over Europe,” he said one day, “and this beardless kid thought he was going to tell me I couldn’t smoke in my room. Jesus H. Christ, we took care of him!”

  Mom was reading the New York Times. Her voice leapt gleefully from the tent of its pages like a cat on a mole. “I wasn’t aware the Lord has a middle name.”

  “Holy,” Pops said. I watched in amazement—seeing his error, he was twisting in air, shielding his jugular. “The ‘H’ is for ‘Holy.’ Sorry, Serena,” he threw my way.

  “Horse shit,” the Times retorted, with a jubilant shake.

  Pops has always been fond of the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” He was raised Catholic, and still is, but he lives his life according to a to-each-his-own philosophy. When it came to my upbringing and religion, he deferred to Mom, and she saw to it that church was hardly mentioned. In our house, it was just an oddity that Pops would occasionally go off to Mass.

  My mother’s the atheist of the family. Her family—the older generation, I should say—were staid and careful Protestants. “I can’t tell you,” she’d say, her voice full with the fleshy tones of televangelism, “how many awful Sundays I endured.” It had become a litany. “Poker-stiff, hands folded, eyes in my lap on a straight-backed chair, wa-a-aitin’ on Jesus. Praise God!” she was fond of finishing. “A-men, and A-A-A-men!”

  Life with them was . . . unusual. I was forever picking up— and in some cases putting right back down—all sorts of books that Mom had around. One day there would appear a novel that might as well have been in Sumerian, by James Joyce. The next, poems as good as Greek, by Ezra Pound. An accurate generalization about my mother is that the more complicated something is, the better she likes it—and she’s given to saying outrageous things, just for effect. I remember a particularly interesting phase where she made loose with the work of Freud.

  “That Maureen Brown,” she proclaimed one night over leg of lamb, “wouldn’t be so bitchy if someone would nail her good.”

  Mom was referring, of course, to Mrs. Brown’s getting a little bedtime action, but what did I know? This was before sex ed at the Buckners’. I sat there, contemplating an alarming but pure image of Maureen Brown ten-pennied to the country club wall— hair a perfect beehive, the beady eyes and stiff tails of dead animals hanging about her shoulders. Ermine, Mom would always point out, not mink.

  “I like Jim Brown,” Pops said. “You like Jim, don’t you?”

  “Jim’s all right. He left her, didn’t he?”

  Mom about drove Pops and me nuts with her eyebrow-raised analyses of everyone she knew, because he and I had to live in the same house and squirm right under her magnifying glass. Now, I’m not one of those people who can’t or won’t appreciate their parents’ humanity. I love my folks dearly, but I’d have to be blind not to see their foibles. My father and mother are the most self-absorbed people I know. They’ve always been vague about why I’m an only child—I was either such a blessing, they feared another would be pushing their luck, or such a trial, they stopped while they were ahead. I never got to just be a kid. God help me if I scuffed my shoes or went out with uncombed hair. We never had visits from Santa or the Easter bunny, the way other families did, and the Tooth Fairy never left booty at our house. My mother’s parenting philosophy was, “Children are better off raised to see things as they are.” So I sped through childhood as the third Capshaw adult.

  The small one with limited power.

  The way they were raising me didn’t sit well with the extended family. Pops’s family has always been a little leery of Mom. They didn’t dare say a thing, but her family made up for it. One night when I was around eight, her brother Bob and his family dropped by. It was a beautiful evening—the beginning of spring, warm and clear, too early for mosquitoes. My father had just bought me a book of bride-doll paper dolls, which my cousin Terry and I took out to the porch with two pairs of scissors. The adults got left to do what they always did. They spaced themselves around the squat-legged dining room table over coffee.

  After a short, for the most part friendly discussion—something the school board had done, I think—Uncle Bob suddenly said, “I don’t care if you get mad at me here, but I think you should be taking Serena to church. Or Sunday school, at least.”

  Now, the peculiar thing about my mother’s family is, the madder they get, the lower their voices. Through the screen door I saw Mom’s hands fly up in the dismissing gesture she has. “Oh, Bob,” she said, h
er tone somewhere between amused and annoyed, then I caught the phrase superstitious tripe. She said, “All that blather about a ghost in a gale, tongues of fire, babbling in tongues. We’re teaching her right from wrong, how to use a fork, for God’s sake.”

  Uncle Bob said, “That’s just like you, we’re not discussing the rules of etiquette.”

  And Mom said, “It’s only good manners, Bob, to keep one’s bloody nose out.”

  I looked at Terry.

  She moved her shoulders vaguely up and down and went back to her cutting.

  I have to confess. My nose has never been very good at keeping itself out. I squinted through the screen. Uncle Bob was leaning across the table. He started in how my mother was selfcentered, she was feeding me God-is-dead casserole and atheistic stew. The terms didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they were so odd, and everyone inside was so agitated, I made a mental note.

  Aunt Louisa laid her hand on Uncle Bob’s arm.

  “Bo-Bo, calm down.”

  I like my Aunt Louisa. She was blessed at birth with a soothing disposition she’s somehow managed to carry over into late life. She said to Mom, “Really, Annie, she might take after her father.”