Eight Hundred Grapes: a perfect summer escape to a sun-drenched vineyard

My phone rang again, vibrating through the house.

“Don’t hang up,” Ben said.

“Didn’t we just do this?”

“You answered, didn’t you? A part of you wants to hear what I have to say.”

He wasn’t wrong. There was a way to turn off the phone. I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t been able to. Part of me wanted Ben to tell me a story that would make this all okay, that would make him familiar again.

I sat down on the staircase, my dress billowing out to the sides.

“You need to understand, I didn’t even know about Maddie until a couple of months ago …” he said.

“Your daughter?”

He paused. “Yes. My daughter.”

“How old is she, Ben?”

“Maddie is four and a half.”

He emphasized the half and I knew why. We had been together for five years. The half meant she was conceived before me, before us.

“I obviously wasn’t going to keep this a secret forever, but it’s complicated with Michelle,” he said. “And I wanted to smooth that part of this out before I dragged you into it.”

“Complicated how?”

He paused. “That’s complicated.”

I stood up again. I’d had enough—enough of Ben’s non-explanation, enough of my heart pounding in my throat.

“Look, I just don’t want you to do anything rash. We’re getting married in a week.”

“I’m not so sure about that, at the moment.”

He got quiet. “That’s what I mean by rash,” he said.

He sounded devastated. And the problem was that it reminded me of the first time I’d spoken to him. My law firm had just signed Ben as a client and I called to introduce myself shortly after his bike was stolen. I didn’t know this about him yet, but Ben had owned that bike for ten years. It was less his preferred mode of transportation and more … an appendage. And still, by the end of our conversation, he was joking, happy. His bike, and his sorrow, a thing of the past. Because of me, he said. And, even now, there was a huge part of me that wanted to make him feel that good again.

“Where are you?” he said. “Let me come talk to you in person.”

I was at the top of the stairs. Maybe because Ben asked where I was, I looked around. My bedroom was to the left—the door wide open. My parents’ bedroom was to the right.

And coming out of my parents’ bedroom was a large man. Two hundred and fifty pounds large. With hair and skin I didn’t recognize. In a towel.

My mother, in a matching towel, stood close to him.

This man, who was not my father.

I dropped the phone. “Oh my God!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

“Oh my God!” my mother screamed back.

The man moved away, backward, toward my parents’ bedroom, which he apparently knew all too well.

Then, as if thinking better of it, he reached out his hand. “Henry,” he said.

I was stuck in place, right at the top of the stairs. I reached, as though it made sense, for this man’s hand.

My mother covered her mouth in abject horror. I thought it was her disgrace at being caught. But then she reached for me, touching my cheek with the front of her hand, then with the back.

“What did you do to your wedding dress?” she asked.

Regarding Henry

If I were keeping count—and who was keeping count?—it wasn’t shaping up to be the best day of my life.

I sat in the dining room with my mother, the two of us dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, my dress hanging on the door, the silence between us aggressive.

Henry was gone. My mother had said good-bye to him on the front steps while I waited for him to walk away. It was like what my mother had done to me my senior year of high school, when I was dating tattooed and mean Lou Emmett. But in a gross reverse.

My mother poured herself a cup of coffee, avoiding my eyes. I wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Normally, I’d reach across the table, make this conversation easier for her, but I couldn’t do that this time. My mother was going to have to do that—she’d have to figure out herself how she was going to explain this.

Instead, I stared at the wall above her head, lined with photographs, all the photographs that made up my parents’ life together—beginning when they were young, at this vineyard, and even before that. One of my favorite photographs was of my mother, still a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, smiling at the camera, her cello resting against her long black dress. The woman sitting here now looking remarkably like the photograph of herself then. She had the same long curls, wide cheeks, a nose that didn’t quite fit. She was still not wearing a drop of makeup, still not needing any.

Next to that photograph of her was one of me playing softball. I’d been a complete tomboy growing up (care of trying to keep up with Bobby and Finn). I’d pretty much lived in a T-shirt and sneakers, my hair perpetually in a ponytail. But there was no denying how similar we used to look: my curls the darker version of her curls, my nose tilted like her nose, my eyes dark green like my father’s but shaped like hers.

My mother used to say that I was the spitting image of her, cloaked in my father’s coloring. That was until I moved to Los Angeles and transformed in the way Los Angeles seems to transform people: a little bit at a time until you don’t recognize yourself anymore. With all the gorgeous women strolling through yoga class and into parties, I found myself paying attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t historically.

Maybe it would have been the same thing if I’d left Sebastopol for New York or Chicago, but for me, at eighteen, it was Los Angeles that I left for, so it was Los Angeles where I learned some fundamental lessons that growing up in a house full of men and farmers had forgotten to teach me about how to look and feel sexy.

You could see the transformation on the wall. My mother joked that I’d morphed from the darker version of her into the glam, movie star version—which, I assured her, a walk down Abbot Kinney among the real movie stars would prove untrue. Though, in truth, I did look different and I took a certain amount of pride in that.

The Southern California sun had lightened my hair, I’d slipped off ten pounds, and I’d started to dress as though I had some idea of how to. Under my friend Suzannah’s supervision (and insistence), I’d spent more money on a pair of shoes than on a month’s rent. I tried to return them the next day—in guilt and nausea—but the store had a strict no-return policy. So I’d kept them. And loved them. In fairness to myself, these had been magic shoes: slinky stiletto heels that made your legs look endless. In further fairness, the shoes had outlasted that apartment and all the ones that had come since.

Whenever I’d come home for a visit, my mother would always say how stylish I looked. But I knew she judged my evolution from ponytails to pencil skirts. My mother thought style should be effortless and easy. She took to touching my straightened hair, saying, “Shiny.” She commented on new items of clothing with a whistle and a shifty grin: “Look at that Los Angeles armor.”

And it was always first thing in the morning—when I was freshly awake and racing downstairs for her walnut and cherry waffles, the same way I’d done as a child—that she would touch my skin and say, “Gorgeous.”

The disjunct left me feeling somewhat alone in navigating my two homes. Sonoma County was blue jeans and fleece pullovers and practical field boots. Los Angeles was slingbacks and blue jeans distressed to the tune of $275. I wavered between the two worlds, neither feeling like it fit exactly right. I was self-conscious about my lifestyle in Los Angeles—a lifestyle on which I felt I had a tenuous hold at best. And when I came home, the put-together version of me who seemed to have it all together felt myself judging, in a way I never used to, how unrefined and rural local life was. I didn’t like being judgmental in that way, but I was having trouble stopping myself. I was still trying to find the balance.

I lowered my gaze from the photographs, looked down. My mother caught my eyes, held them. Then she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t stand there in judgment of me,” she said.

It didn’t seem wise to tell her I was sitting in judgment.

“There was a naked man coming out of your bedroom, Mom,” I said. “Who wasn’t Dad.”

“Well, who shows up at midnight unannounced?” She shook her head. “It’s our fault for not redecorating your room. You think nothing here is supposed to change.”

“I think you’re not supposed to be shtupping someone who isn’t Dad.”

“Well, I’m not shtupping him.”

I looked at her, confused. “What?”

She shrugged. “Henry is impotent, if you must know.”

I covered my ears. “I must not know. I must go back in time and know anything but that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m just saying … I’m just trying to explain to you that things are more complicated than they seem.”

Complicated. That was Ben’s word too. The problem was that they were both using it passively. When the truth was that they had made things complicated. Actively. That was the important part they each were leaving out.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Dad and I are taking a little time apart,” she said. “He’s been staying in the winemaker’s cottage for the last couple of weeks. Not that he doesn’t do that every year during the harvest.”

There was an edge to how she said that, which I chose to ignore.

“Because of Henry?” I asked.

“Because we’re taking time apart,” she said.

I looked through the bay windows to the lantern-lit vineyard, the lantern-lit path that led to the winemaker’s cottage. My father was asleep in one of the two bedrooms inside. When I was a little girl, I’d beg to sleep in the other room and go out with him first thing in the morning to help pick the first grapes before school. I told him that when I was older my brothers and I were going to take over the land for him—to keep his legacy running. I meant it. Running the vineyard was what I had wanted more than anything when I was a little girl. Now I had left him there alone. Each in our own way, we all had.

“How could you not have told me what was going on?” I asked.

My mother reached for her coffee. “We were waiting until after your wedding. We didn’t want to ruin it for you.”

I met her eyes. Apparently Ben and I had done that all ourselves.

“I’ve tried not to burden Finn and Bobby with this either. They both have their hands full with other things.”

I thought back to the bar—Finn acting weird when Bobby came up. Bobby nowhere to be seen. “With what things?” I said.

She shook her head. “I can’t get into all of that right now. They should be allowed to be here to offer their side.”

How had we gotten to the place where everyone in the family was on different sides? I had been home for the last harvest, I had been home another time since—everyone had seemed fine. Now though? I felt like I was going to cry. And Ben—usually my first call when I felt this way, the one person who could help me find perspective on this—was the reason I had none.

My mother cleared her throat, seeing an opportunity to change the subject. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Did he do something unforgivable?”

“What kind of question is that?”

She leaned in. “A bad one, probably. What’s a good one? Tell me and I’ll ask.”

Ever since I’d left the bridal shop, I’d envisioned sitting at this table with my mother and my father, talking it out. The way we had when I’d needed to figure out what college to go to, how to pay for law school, how to get over a thousand broken hearts. Now my concern was that the three of us were never going to be sitting here again.

“Georgia …”

I looked up.

“Did you do something unforgivable?”

“Stop using that word. No.”

“Well, is there someone else?”

Normally, my mother was the first to think adultery went into the unforgivable category.

“Yes, there is. And she’s four-and-a-half years old.”

My mother looked confused.

“He has a daughter. That he’s kept from me.”

She went silent, the calm before her impending storm. My mother couldn’t stand dishonesty. She was wisecracking and irritable and stubborn. But, beyond all that, she was remarkably genuine. And she demanded the same of the people she loved.

She reached for her coffee. “I’m sure Ben has an explanation for this,” she said.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “I just told you that Ben has a child with someone, and he didn’t choose to share that information. I found out at my dress fitting when I saw him walking down the street with the mother of his child.”

“I understand. It’s awful. Particularly that he didn’t tell you.” She paused. “I’m just putting it out there that he may have an explanation for keeping this to himself.”

This was what she had to offer me? Pre-Henry, my mother would have demanded blood from Ben. She would have stormed around the dining room talking about values, the way she’d done when my best friend in high school had used her parents’ restaurant to throw herself an open-bar birthday party. Even when I explained how that had happened, she had said there was no explanation. You either were truthful or you weren’t, and that defined you.

Where was that mother now, screaming about Ben’s lie of omission? Why couldn’t she take on that role so I could find my way to the other one—the one where I got to find sympathy for Ben in her outsized protection of me. That was the mother I knew.

I stood up. “I can’t deal with this right now. I’m going to bed.”

“Then go.”

I headed for the door, completely exhausted and ready for the night to be done.

“Henry is an old friend,” my mother called out after me. “We knew each other back in New York. And he recently was named the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.”

I turned around, but stayed in the doorway.

She shrugged. “He’s only been out here a few months, but it’s been nice. Just … to be a part of that world again.”

Part of that world. She looked defeated saying the words and remembering it—who she used to be, how she used to be. It made me want to convince her that she was still a part of it: She had been the music teacher in town for decades. But that wasn’t the same thing. And what was the point in trying to convince her it was, anyway? As if anyone could convince you of the one thing you didn’t want to see.

“What does that have to do with you and Dad?” I said instead.

She looked up at me.

“I’m not talking about Dad. I’m talking about you and me. You have always tried to take care of everyone in this family, just like I have. As opposed to figuring out what you want. Not what you’re supposed to want, but what you truly want.”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.

“You can’t seriously think you’re in a good position to offer me advice on my romantic life at the moment.”

She met my eyes. “I think I’m in a great position, actually,” she said. “No one sees what an incomparable person you are more than I do. Except, perhaps, Ben.”

She paused. And then she said it simply. “Be careful what you give up.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, trying—in spite of myself—to hear what she wasn’t saying. “Because you can’t get it back?”

She stood up, walking past me in the doorway.

“No.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.”

I waited for her to disappear up the stairs before heading that way myself. But before my mother was gone, she called out a final good night. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re home.”

That made one of us.

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