“Familiars”

Once again Jeff and his wife, Laurie, with Mattie and her husband, Daniel, were driving down to the coastal house they’d rented together for seventeen consecutive summers—a record maybe for two-couple compatibility.

Known to the four as “the Camel,” the two-level beach house, raised on stilts in the North Carolina sand, was as mismatched in its seaside row as the motley of furniture within—sleigh bed, brass bed, Empire sofa, Morris chair, pressed-oak dining set. The heavier furniture and kitchen appliances had worn dark depressions in the original linoleum.

Ungainly on the outside, the house was as easy to slip into as an old shoe. It greeted them again with the familiar message painted on the frame of the entrance hall mirror: “Deep in the gleaming glass, she sees all past things pass.” And after seventeen summers, Margaret, the agent who managed the rental, had become “Peggy dear,” the one who made sure the Camel was available for their August fortnight. Having dealt with the pre-vacation arrangements seventeen times over, she kept the couples properly in order with a memory aid: “Jeff and Laurie, hunky-dory; Daniel and Mattie, he’s her fatty,” though you’d hardly call Daniel fat.

Observing them on vacation for the first time, you might be thrown off by the indiscriminate teasing and flirtation, though not if you knew their history. Bonded since university days, they’d lived in an off-campus house in 1980s Ann Arbor. In that time of backward-gazing envy at the guilt-free wandering of the previous decade, they had even swapped partners for a season. But with the real world looming in the weeks before graduation, they had returned to the original pairing. It wasn’t long after that, they settled into their conventional marriages.

The four remained close, with a lasting pride in the peaceful way they absorbed the bruises of their early ménage. The two couples lived in a northern Virginia county, where Jeff was a headhunter for civilian cybersecurity hires in the Defense Department, and Daniel, a systems engineer in corporate computing. Mattie designed a wool company’s most intricate knitting patterns, while Laurie’s preoccupation was her journal writing, which reached back to their time in Ann Arbor. It gratified her to see how the mundane jotting gained significance with age.

Of the four, only Mattie, the knitter, had shown resistance to another summer reunion, an inward groan at the prospect, and a shrug when husband Daniel reminded her of the August dates. “What?” he’d asked her. And louder: “What?” It was nothing, she assured him, just all the deferred obligations, and September always rushing toward them.

In truth, Mattie enjoyed the summer gatherings as much as any of them. But she was thinking of Laurie’s notebook, her pen so busy in the evenings, the curiosity and cryptic scribbling. What if Laurie became tired of anonymity and released her privileged note taking to a wider world? And Mattie disliked being thought of as a woman of leisure. She still had something to prove, if only to parents whose faith in her university education had been shaken by a daughter whose career rested on the manipulation of knitting needles.

With the vacation upon them, Mattie apologized for her moody resistance. Her commitment to the four-way friendship ran deeper than her fear. If Laurie’s busy pen unnerved her, or her husband’s walks down the beach with Laurie seemed overlong, these reactions must be her own communal failing. It would have calmed her further to know how many times “Mattie’s guilelessness” was celebrated in the journal, which was kept with a mariner’s strict rule for his ship’s log; nothing could be erased, only amplified. Without that rule, Laurie might have forgotten things like “Couldn’t blame Mattie for any of today’s fuss.” Whatever the fuss was had been lost, but not Laurie’s written declaration of it.

*

The two couples had produced three children. There was Jeff and Laurie’s twenty-year-old Charlotte, who was taking a college gap year. Squandering the gap, they thought, in a local coffee shop. To either side of Charlotte in age were Mattie and Daniel’s boys, Gerald, twenty-three, who had breezed through college, and their less ambitious Rudy, eighteen, enrolled after high school in a music theory course at their community college, and living with his guitar in their basement.

Forced together over the years, the children’s regard for one another was warm and cool by turns, the older Gerald’s early attraction to Charlotte worn away by the embarrassments of puberty and forced proximity. The summer vacations, the Thanksgivings, the Christmas meals had made her more a sister, a difficult one, mirror-proud, he thought. Before the vacation this year, Charlotte had texted him, “If y’re still Gerry7@plenty.net, pls respond abt ’rents to N.C. again.” At twenty, she was thoroughly tired of the too-enthusiastic togetherness of the four parents, their tiresome displays of mutual admiration. Gerald did not reply.

The women, Mattie and Laurie, were used to indulging their husbands’ mutual commiseration, their mal de cybersiècle. Both men knew the paths to their computers’ inner lives, how to reach and read screens of arcane code. But for all their computer savvy, they acted as if they stood alone in sensitivity to IT’s spawn—that cloud of information hanging over the planet. They were trapped under that roof of open secrets. Tied to the same generation of phones, tablets, laptops, their lives bared to the data-mining engineers, the masters of surveillance capitalism. The planet-heating cover was as insidious to them as the carbon wrapping the globe.

They watched in pain while others no brainier than they turned wide swaths of this cover into personal fortunes. They strolled the beach while their wives took to hands and knees in the sand, searching for sharks’ teeth, happily apart from their husbands’ latest sorrows. Such a circus on the internet, the men agreed, and a circus had its amusements: Jeff’s news from frozen Archangel by way of New York: “Hello, do you remember? You could not see me. I am Marina with Russia. Waiting for you in New York. See my picture. Are you sorry for the hair on my eye?”

Daniel coincidentally had just been contacted by another Russian lady, Anna, age twenty-six, looking for a friendship, maybe more. “Call to me,” with international digits provided, though Anna’s picture was no match for the swim-suited Marina on Jeff’s phone. “Did you get this?” Daniel pulled up a late message of financial opportunity: “Revealed. The first energy generator that violates laws of physics, humiliating top scientists. Even after eighty-four years.”

The men saw no irony in the skin-close proximity of their nth-generation cell phones tucked in the pockets of their bathing trunks. Cooling their feet in the ocean, they shared more symmetry: mutual reports of stranded familiars, Jeff’s friend Amos in the Cairo airport, and Daniel’s cousin in a police station in Amsterdam, their wallets and passports stolen, with no recourse but the kindness of contacts in America. And, as if reducing their pair of virtual obligations to an easy solution, both men had been contacted by a potential benefactor, Fred Ugwu, officer of a bank in Burkina Faso, ready to pay 40 percent of the principal for help in transferring $10.5 million dormant in the account of a deceased depositor.

They could be thankful the digital intrusions had left something of their privacy intact, things the data cloud could never capture, traits and habits, endearing or off-putting, which had attracted, split, and recombined the two couples twenty years earlier, quirks and endearments still at play, along with others since acquired and observed:

Daniel’s bitten-to-nub fingernails, his apnea and recently acquired night-breathing apparatus, once attached, making sex a bridge too far; his wet-eyed emotion in poetic recitation, the accuracy of his impromptu imitations, his one dance move, with his arm pumping up and down like an oil rig.

Mattie’s spatulate thumbs, her snorting laugh, which no amount of Daniel’s imitation could discourage, that beautiful face belying the comic explosion from her perfectly formed nose, the ever-so-gentle touch of her loving hand, one dimpled cheek, her tiresome, nettling skepticism: “Interesting—if true.”

Jeff’s slight lisp, like a radio newsman’s, noticeable enough to make him want to prove it no impediment at all, really a complement to his measured conversation; his heavy beard, face dark by early afternoon, his inclusive kindness, his lightly worn political acumen, the humorous confusion of his legs on water skis; his persistent “hopefully” habit.

Laurie’s tendency to leap to a contrary position; the wide birthmark on her cheek, which Jeff called “love paint,” never covered with makeup, her bright, perfectly spaced teeth, a tongue that could be flexed into clover shape, a pleasing singing voice, garrulous in a checkout line. Alone among the four, she talked in that millennial pattern that turned all declarations into questions.

All the stuff of endearment or repulsion inscribed in longevity’s permanent ink. At someone’s house party in a long-ago winter in Ann Arbor, Jeff and Daniel had stood looking across a room at Jeff’s then partner, Mattie, standing with some younger boys, when Daniel said, “Will you look at our high-bush, low-ass lady,” waiting for a laugh. Jeff flinched at the accuracy of it, the backward tilt and tipped-up pelvis, as if Mattie imagined herself at a fancier do, holding a posture of impregnability. Harsh for all its descriptive acuity.

It wasn’t revenge so much as equalizing banter when Jeff, on his way to class with Mattie, came up behind Daniel and asked her, “Was he always a toe walker?”

Daniel? A toe walker? Mattie wasn’t familiar with the term, but Daniel did spring up a bit when he walked, bouncing forward on the balls of his feet. In the library next day, she learned that toe walking could be a symptom of autism in toddlers, and sometimes a sign of aggression in older children and adults. But there was little aggression in Daniel, or any of them.

In their Ann Arbor cohabitation, the four had taken turns cooking, washing up, and doing housecleaning. You’d hardly know they were students under academic pressure. No beer-sticky floors. In this respect, the women agreed, they might be self-denied prisoners of habit. Their revolt was that interim of switched intimacy. Looking backward, they considered the peaceful transitions a proof of the maturity that had followed them into adult lives. The men liked to think it had been their idea. They were wrong.

They’d been sitting around their dining table, finishing off a bottle of that strawberry-flavored booze water called Boone’s Farm, when Jeff said, “Everybody’s hands on the table, palms down.” Mattie hesitated, guessing what was coming, though she obliged. Right away, all eyes on her thumbs. “Parking meters!” Jeff exploded. And Mattie laughed with the others because her thumbs were surely oddities. But weren’t all of them freaks of one kind or another? From hilarity to sober discussion; it was Laurie who said, “Mattie and I have been thinking? We’re all in a kind of rut.”

No betrayal, the switch was raised for debate by Laurie, and discussed almost clinically. They might have been having a house meeting about the chore schedule. To accommodate Mattie, Jeff would take on contraceptive responsibility and drop a morning seminar—he didn’t need the credits—to match Mattie’s no-class schedule on Friday. Mattie’s foam mattress only fit the bed she’d been sleeping in, so the men would shift rooms, Daniel accepting half the closet space he’d been used to.

The same four-way peace carried on. It was only in the bedrooms they went to each night that you’d notice the difference. It had been the university housing office that brought the compatible foursome together, and it took little time for this default menagerie to form a discrete cell, walled off from encroachment of the wider student community. In that era of venereal fright, long before an epidemic made pod life a thing of necessity. In their closed foursome, there was no fear in recombining as Laurie-Daniel and Mattie-Jeff.

The four had been the more compatible for their inherited freedom from dogma. Daniel’s parents had neither hidden their Jewish heritage nor kept its rituals. Laurie’s bloodline included a great-uncle who’d written The Mistakes of Jesus, and a mother guided by Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”; Jeff’s Quaker parents had produced a nonjudgmental son, while Mattie had faced down and overcome her family’s fear that liberal arts were a pathway to artisanal poverty.

At the beach, while the two couples relaxed into vacation freedom, Jeff and Laurie’s daughter, Charlotte, spent carefree mornings in her Leesburg coffee shop, chatting with regulars, her phone on the table, ready for calls from “’rents on the Outer Banks.” Unlike her father, she felt cozily wrapped in the information surround, mindless of the young man across from her, typing her conversations into his blog, “Coffee-Shop Diary,” building a small but growing audience for her mother’s recycled beach news. Without scruple to privacy, Charlotte’s voice competed in the coffee shop with the transatlantic exuberance of a German au pair Skyping daily with a sister in Frankfurt.

“All of them in the same beach house again,” Charlotte complained, “I think it’s pervy.”

On the Carolina coast, beyond the sliding glass doors of the Camel’s dining room, the sea at sunset gave majesty to “remember whens,” and old news that could only interest those four alone, reminiscences brought forward and released as calmly as the in and out of the lapping tide.

“He didn’t!”

“He did, you know.”

Any embarrassment quickly ebbed into silence. In fact, this year the four made a circle of satisfaction in one another’s accomplishments—the award Mattie was getting for invention of a kind of knitting on top of knitting, relief sculpture in wool. She was “Ninja Knit” to an internet community dazzled by the work. Jeff was about to be made the headhunters’ managing partner, with a commensurate income bump. Daniel was already his company’s indispensable genius domus in software crises. And who could tell; there was the tacit possibility that under Laurie’s vigilant eye they might come forth one day as the disguised celebrities of an anonymous beach house chronicle.

*

“Look at this.” Daniel was showing them pictures of his wife’s latest creation captured in his cell phone, a woolen landscape in relief, with a red machine laying down a swath of wheat on a rolling field. The post was followed by:

“Someone take credit for this.”

“How does she do it?”

“She?”

“All right, he/she. Amazing either way.”

“The thread continues? Ha-ha.”

“Yarn?” asked Daniel.

“Oh be quiet,” Mattie hissed. “I asked you not to share that.”

*

Thanks to Charlotte’s loose lips and the “Coffee-Shop Diary” entries, the “ménage à quatre” in North Carolina had taken up residence in the cybersphere. The seventeenth reunion of two couples and a speculation of crawling at night or perhaps assignations in the sedge. Charlotte’s account passed on in Billy’s blog recounted a Russian sex talker’s invitation on a father’s cell phone.

Up north, Charlotte sent another text to Gerald. “I kn yr getting ths. We ned to tlk.”

This time Gerald replied. “Haven’t you already been talking too much?”

“Are you aware of what’s going on down there?”

“That your mother thinks she’s on a private beach?”

“You could tell your father to lift his eyes.”

“Shy rights for the topless?”

“Be civil. We have a problem.”

“Like the last time we were down there? You slapped me. Remember?”

“I was thirteen!”

“Sixteen and thirteen? Isn’t that about right?”

From cyber thrust and parry to truce, Charlotte and Gerald agreed to meet in the coffee shop.

*

With Billy’s coffee-shop blog circulating further, not just Laurie but the whole beach party was aware of their new unwanted celebrity. They put themselves on communication lockdown.

The women’s collection of sharks’ teeth grew to two dozen. The daily hunt was more fun than the jigsaw puzzle of a lighthouse. Fossilized teeth from sixty million years ago gave the hunt a timeless excitement, while the men had nothing as interesting to show for their two weeks, just darkened tan lines above and below their trunks. Wistful as they strolled. No matter how sunny, always under the data cloud, their musing drifting away on the breeze.

On the last night of the vacation, the four drank a good deal of gin before dinner, but you wouldn’t blame alcohol for what happened. In lubricated camaraderie, old affectation unremarked: Mattie’s provocative party posture, unchanged since university; the way Daniel bounced into the room—ready to pounce on what? They were all seated around the coffee table, watching a cloche bonnet grow from two balls of wool, fixed on the rapid click of Mattie’s knitting needles. Her fingers slowed or hurried ahead with the pace of the conversation and Jeff’s recollection of the heroic toss of a basketball from half-court. Her hands came to a full stop.

“Interesting—if true,” she said.

Daniel’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. “Do you have to doubt everything?”

Her fingers began to move again. God, it’s aggravating, he thought, reminding everyone in the room of her industry while they chatted about nothing important. He snapped.

“Damn it! Could you stop with the click-click!”

Silence. Up to him to repair the moment. Instead, he said, “Come off your high horse, Mattie. It’s no mystery, what you do. It’s just knit or purl. Binary. You’re as digital as the rest of us.” There was silence again, then his merriment standby: “All hands on the table, palms down.”

Quick as slapjack, Mattie yanked a needle from her work, spilling a row of stitches, and stabbed the needle full force into the back of her husband’s hand, past tendon and bone, all the way into the table. The four of them stared at the little circle of blood spreading over the wound.

*

Instead of shouting and a vacation gone haywire, the silence turned into a panicky four-way push for repair. Laurie grabbed the car keys to drive Daniel to Emergency Care. She thought inexpert removal of the needle could do further damage, but Daniel had already pulled it free, and Mattie was wrapping the wound with a dish towel. It was agreed that Jeff would stay behind to talk Mattie down from a confused self-dread and a sudden palsy in the hand that had stabbed her husband.

The Emergency Care people, awakened by the night bell, wanted first to know how this happened, and were insulted to be told it was an accident. They kept accusing eyes on Laurie. There was an aside to Daniel as a tetanus shot was given: “I’m calling the police,” and the medical tech would have done it if Daniel hadn’t insisted he couldn’t charge anyone for his own carelessness.

On the way home, he was sitting sideways in the front seat, staring in grateful wonder at his driver.

“What?” Laurie said.

“This,” he said, touching the birthmark on her cheek. As if a once ragged continent had become a charmed island, offering succor to a mutineer’s shame.

At the cottage, the two others were chatting behind a closed bedroom door. Easy conversation and occasional laughter. Laurie and Daniel nodded in silent approval of the other couple’s privacy. They poured the last of the gin over ice, kicked back in the living room, ready to let their mates choose their own curfew, giving themselves over to confessions of old prejudices and desires.

More time passed and eventually they understood that Jeff and Mattie were not coming out to join them. Laurie tried their door. It was locked. Her pursed lips and Daniel’s raised brow were less the signals of resignation than first signs of mutual satisfaction in the night’s new freedom. They went hand in hand into the other bedroom and began to talk about how they would do this, with a gentleness and memories of each other’s expectations.

By morning, all were in their own rooms again. At nine, there was bleary-eyed humming in the kitchen. The first question was, “Which line in the percolator?” And the first quibble, which of two routes north they should take.

They were out of state before eleven, with a succession of public radio stations doing most of the talking, and little thought of home-front damage or confused children or office colleagues, though Laurie said, “Thank God none of us uses social media,” to which the men might have piped together, “No, they use us.”

Behind them, the Camel waited by the lapping tide.