by Ursula Hegi
“I’m all for her joy. But I also want that tree to survive.”
“I’ll take her to Sparky’s.” He kissed Annie on the lips and ran outside, where he danced with Opal around the tree.
Her little fists clutched his fingers, and now both of them were laughing as he danced her away from the tulip tree.
THE SPRING Opal was seven, the floods came back, and with the floods a letter from a Realtor, David Withers, offering to list their house: “I am currently contacting a few people like you to see if they’re interested in talking with me about the possibility of selling…”
“What the fuck does ‘people like you’ mean?” Annie asked.
It went on like that: “…preapproved clients prepared to make an attractive offer…appreciate it greatly if you could take the time to…any buildings or pieces of land that you know of…”
“He means turning in our neighbors,” Mason said.
A week later, another letter, recommending they sell before flood damages decreased the value of their property. Though the flood didn’t reach them, their neighbors, Ellen and Fred, had to sandbag to keep their house from flooding. When Annie and Mason helped them, they found out that Ellen and Fred had received the same letters.
“My clients like the location of your property. It’s in a lovely spot…. I hope that, with my letter, I’m not intruding on your privacy. It’s not my intent…”
“That’s a joke,” Fred said.
“And here I thought our house was the special one.” Ellen swung a sandbag toward Mason.
He caught it in both arms, settled it atop the other bags. “Next thing you know he’ll be knocking at the door.”
When the waters receded, the man who’d written the letters did indeed knock on their door. It was a Saturday morning, and Opal was playing near the front door, climbing up the ladder of her playhouse and leaping down.
“I have a surprise for you,” the man said.
Mason instantly knew who he was. It was the pushiness, the disregard for privacy.
“A picture of your little girl on top of her playhouse.” He showed Annie his digital camera.
“You can’t do that,” she said.
“It’s for you. A present. Such a sweet little—”
Mason stepped up against him. “How dare you—”
“I stopped by to see if you ever think of selling your property. I wrote you two letters. I have preapproved—”
“How dare you take a photo of our child?”
“But it’s not for me, the photo. I thought you might want me to make a print for you. I’ll drop it off to you tomorrow.”
Mason shoved his hand at the Realtor’s chest.
“Or would you like me to e-mail the photo—”
Again, Mason shoved, hard, and as the man fell, Mason tore the camera from him.
“Let him leave.” Annie held on to Mason’s arm.
Mason shook himself free. “He has no right to—”
“You’re nuts,” the Realtor yelled.
“Watch this.” Mason swung the camera against the front steps. Smashed it. “You’re next.”
Annie motioned the man away. “Just get out.”
“I have your name from your letter,” Mason shouted.
Cautiously, the man backed away.
“All right, Mason?” Annie asked. “All right?”
“You don’t care that some stranger is taking photos of our child?”
The man turned, ran toward his car, ducking even before he slid himself behind the steering wheel.
“Of course I mind,” Annie said, “but you don’t have to beat him up.”
“Next thing he’ll be selling her picture online.”
“That’s bizarre. Stop it. Please,” she said. “We’ll file a complaint with his company.”
Mason
—trembled, I felt sorry for him.
“Jake?” you asked. “Do you believe Mason has any idea what trust means?”
“No.” Trembling…Jake was trembling. Sweat on his chest, on his belly.
And I was sure that anything the two of you might do could not hurt me like what I saw inside my head. It’s like…like trying not to look at something, Annie. How that effort of not looking only makes me see it fully. Like that photo in the film book I still have from college…a razor slicing into a woman’s eyeball.
You know the photo, Annie, from Buñel’s Un Chien Andalou, and how afraid I am to turn that page whenever I get close to it. But since I’m trying so hard not to look, I already see the razor half-buried in the eyeball—more explicit than in the book—and then I must turn to that page to modify the picture inside my brain.
You have offered to tear out that page, Annie. Or throw the book away. But I can’t. And I can’t give it away to some thrift shop, because someone might pick it up and be encumbered by that image from then on. Because that’s where the book falls open.
That’s how it was for me with you and Jake on the tier below me in the sauna, Annie.
“For Christ’s sakes,” I said, “Just turn that page.”
“What page?” Jake asked.
“Turn that page so we don’t have to think about this anymore.”
“You are the only one thinking about this,” you told me.
One collage is not enough. Look at this, behind your worktable. A Thousands Loops. Roundness…your body and Opal’s…curved and one within that roundness. I can’t wreck this—it would screw up our chance together. More collage I haven’t seen yet…two more of our pond where before there were only a few. The rest of the raft again.
Why do you hide them from me, Annie?
I bet you long after we’re dead, Annie, they’ll hang in museums.
You touched Jake’s thing. “Jake?”
Lighter wood next to his thigh than on the rest of the sauna bench. It’s where I replaced four broken slats last spring. I like getting to them before they rot. A few months from now they’ll bled in.
You hand was darker than Jake’s thigh with those tiny bleached hairs that make his skin look even paler than it is. When he moved toward you in the steam, so hesitant—Jake and Annie—it was like being once again on the ferry to Shelter lsland and watching a man with a pregnant woman, guiding the small of her back with his spread hand.
Pride.
Mine
You’d laugh, Annie, if I were to lead you like that. Jake is easier: to nudge, to please, to own. But with his hands on you, I had you both.
You swung yourself atop Jake and—
Four
Jake
{ The Graduate }
“M ason’s father said I’d find you in the kitchen,” Jake tells Annie.
But she doesn’t answer. Keeps her back to him as she fills a glass with water and drinks it slowly.
In the living room, the TV is on. “…Mrs. Robinson…” The old version. Simon and Garfunkel. Not the edgier version of the Lemonheads. “…Jesus loves you more than…”
Jake waits while Annie fills her glass again and empties that too. Avoiding him. Since Mason’s funeral, Jake has called her twice, offering to go to the pond house, pack up whatever she needs, and bring it to her and Opal in North Sea. But all she said was, “I can’t, Jake.”
Can’t what? Talk with me? See me?
“I could leave, Annie—”
She turns to him, her face puffy, clothes too tight.
“—if that makes it easier for you.”
“Easier?”
“Not that it could be any less…horrible. But if you’d rather not have me here—”
“His parents want both of us here.”
Shyness in our voices, our bodies.
“That’s what they told me. Do you know why?”
“No. They just…summoned me. And now they’re in there, watching TV. Don’t leave me alone with them, Jake.”
“I won’t.” He’s afraid that, after today, he’ll never see her again.
“You haven’t said anything to them, hav
e you?”
“Of course not.”
“You think they know?”
“How could they?”
“If Mason called them before he—” She bites her lip.
“No,” Jake says. “No.”
Annie crosses her arms and rubs her palms up and down her upper arms. “It’s always so cold in here. Even in summer.”
“I used to believe they had ice caves underneath their house.”
“Only Mason’s house? Not yours or mine?”
“…all you see are sympathetic eyes…” Simon and Garfunkel. Orchestral and mellow.
“Only Mason’s house. Bluish-white caverns. And that air from those caverns rose and kept the rooms cold.”
For an instant, she smiles. “My mother adored your imagination.” But already she’s blinking tears away. “She died on me too. Everyone’s dying on me, Jake.”
“I am so goddamn sorry.”
“I’ve put the pond house on the market today.”
“Do you need help getting—”
“Ellen and Fred did most of it. Before I got here.”
“How long have you—”
“Day before yesterday.”
“You’re not staying at the house?”
“No. With Ellen and Fred. And they went with me to pack what Opal and I need. The rest is going to Goodwill.”
“Not your work!”
“Fred and I crated it. It’ll be shipped to Aunt Stormy’s.”
“So you’re staying?”
She shrugs.
“I’m at my parents’ for the weekend. They said to invite you for dinner if you like.”
“I’m taking the ferry back once I leave here.”
“And my sister said to say—”
“Give her a hug from me. How—”
Jake waits.
“How are you mourning him, Jake?”
“By being furious with him. And with myself.”
“Me too.”
“Not just for killing himself, but also for—” He wants to hold her, feel the warmth of her skin through her green shirt. But already his mind slams down. Being together killed Mason. He feels dirty being near Annie. Misses Mason—misses him terribly, that instant—those intense eyes on you, so totally on you, spontaneous and direct, expressive eyes that have the potential of something else underneath, even coldness. But when that gaze turns away you tumble.
And I’ve been tumbling ever since. He says, “I miss Opal.” That calms him. And it is true.
Before Opal came to them, the-three-of-us felt right, and then it was the-four-of-us, and Opal made each of them better somehow—more compassionate, more responsible—as she took the focus away from the-three-of-us. Because three-of-us can be dangerous. Jake’s last time at the pond house—the time before the time in the sauna—was just a few days before, when Opal turned eight. He’s celebrated every one of her birthdays with her, and he can’t imagine not being in her life.
He says it again, then: “I miss Opal.”
“I know you miss her,” Annie says.
“Opal…She’s feisty like you. Impulsive like—”
“Like Mason?”
“Just…impulsive. So, at Aunt Stormy’s…what do you and Opal do all day?”
“The usual. Looking at the water. Feeding the ducks. Swimming.”
He nods.
“I’m trying to get her back to the child psychologist Aunt Stormy found for her. She was great with Opal, but after the appointment, Opal said, ‘I don’t want to see that woman again.’ ”
“Probably because she was good.”
“She’s hurting. And talking about it makes her hurt more. She refused to go to her next appointment, kicked and screamed, and so I went to explain to the psychologist, to not stand her up, to ask how to help Opal.”
“Let me see Opal.”
Annie shakes her head.
“I don’t think it’s good for her to be away from me too—”
“We’ve gone to a couple of antiwar protests in Sag Harbor.”
“—to lose both Mason and me.”
“Aunt Stormy and Pete go to the protest every Sunday afternoon. We—”
“Please, Annie?”
“—stand on the wharf in Sag Harbor and—”
“And I also miss you,” he feels compelled to say though he wants to run from her.
“It’s a silent vigil, actually.”
“Miss you from before…how it was before all this.”
“I can’t, Jake.”
“If you think that talking—” He stops himself. Too dangerous.
“No.”
And he is relieved. Why did he even suggest talking? Someday soon he will have to tell her that he saw Mason moments before he killed himself. Tell her because keeping that secret from her will prevent him from being with her and Opal.
“Twenty-six days today,” she says.
If only he’d run into her studio and refused to go away. But he still felt so angry and bewildered that he stayed outside the window, seeing Mason see him. Do it, you bastard. It’s the only thing you can do now. Like a sudden madness…He had imagined Mason dead when they were boys, had played and replayed that death in his mind, so that—for an instant there outside the studio—Jake wasn’t sure if this was happening or imagined, was afraid that if he admitted this was happening, he would be the one to make it so. He couldn’t move. Not even when Mason climbed on Annie’s worktable and stuck his head through a noose. I’ve imagined worse: pushing you off a cliff, from the open door of an airplane— Running. Then. Running and hiding inside his car and locking the door and cowering in the familiar shame that had been his since he was a boy. Then the jolt back to sanity and the morning dark with smoke harsh to breathe. Racing back to the window—too late too late too—and getting away though he knew Annie would be the one to find Mason dead.
“WE MISS him so,” Mrs. Piano says.
“That’s why we wanted to ask both of you—” Mr. Piano starts, but his voice slips.
Mrs. Piano takes his hands into hers. “Was he angry at us?”
“Oh no.” Annie puts her arms around Mrs. Piano.
“We’ve both wondered…” Mr. Piano leans forward. Stares hard at the television, where an actor who seems somewhat familiar is floating in a swimming pool. “…if it was something we said or did that…triggered his—”
“If we could understand…” Mason’s mother watches Annie as if waiting for absolution, or perhaps proof that it was something inside Mason that outpaced all her loving.
What I could tell you— Jake swallows. “Mason could be so generous. Once he gave his leather jacket to a homeless man, though he’d only bought it a week earlier.
Annie is staring at him.
“Do you have any idea why he…did it, Annabelle, took his life?” Mason’s father asks carefully.
“No.” She shakes her head. Widow without a clue.
“No,” Jake says.
Annie digs two fingers into the pocket of her black pants, finds a rubber band, slips it over her wrist, and pulls her hair into a knot so severe that it tugs at her eyebrows and makes her forehead square, changing her instantly from lovely to stern.
Warning me off.
But that potential for ugliness only makes Jake love her more.
“That Dustin character—” Mr. Piano points to the screen.
“That’s who he is!” Now Jake knows. “I’ve just never seen Dustin Hoffman young.”
“—he always wants everything right away,” Mason’s father continues. “And he—”
“His hair looks so…like a rug, almost.”
“—expects his parents to give it to him, while he despises them. See how he’s ignoring them, Annie?”
“I…guess so.”
“It was the style,” Mrs. Piano says. “I don’t think it’s a rug.”
“And the camera is not fair to the parents…makes them seem predatory when they circle him in the pool.”
“Concerned,
not predatory,” Mrs. Piano corrects her husband.
In the pool, a woman and a man are indeed circling the young Dustin Hoffman. To Jake, predatory seems quite accurate. If you consider sharks or crocodiles or piranhas predatory.
“I used to think his parents and their friends were jerks.” Mason’s father takes a handkerchief from his suit jacket. Dabs his lips. “Now I think that Dustin character—”
“His name is Benjamin,” Mrs. Piano says.
“—is a jerk, and that his parents are merely trying to be parents. You two probably like him.”
“I don’t know him,” Annie says.
“We don’t know him,” Jake says.
“How young you are…,” Mrs. Piano says.
“When we were your age,” Mr. Piano says, “The Graduate was our film.”
“A cult film.”
They continue as if they were alone.
“We liked Benjamin.”
“I identified with him,” Mrs. Piano says.
“He was romantic.”
“Romantic and confused.”
A glass vase filled with lemons stands on the gracefully curved piano. The rest of the furniture is all edges: folding metal chairs, a wobbly table, a painted church bench, where Mason’s parents sit, both angular and tall. All edges. Jake’s mother used to say the Pianos kept their thermostat set on frostbite. Whenever he went there, she’d make him take a cardigan. Still, his toes would be curled with cold. His hands he could tuck into his armpits—except when he had to pull them out for his weekly piano lessons.
“A cold house keeps you alert,” Mr. Piano would say. He’d look persecuted when listening to his students, except to Mason, who started lessons when he was three and practiced exuberantly—but only as long as his father sat with him. Look at me look at me look…Without an audience, the switch went off.
Whenever Jake played, Mr. Piano would excuse himself. “Keep playing, Jake. I’ll listen from the kitchen.” His thin face would be pouchy when he’d return, because he’d be chewing, taking bites from something he hid in his palm.
MR.PIANO is chewing smoked almonds as he pours them from a restaurant-size bag and arranges them on a metal tray with Cracker Jacks and string cheese. “Pass the refreshments, Annabelle.”
