Cassie Binegar

by Patricia MacLachlan

  “What’s a kicker?” asked Margaret Mary.

  “Wine,” said Coralinda, smiling faintly.

  “Seven and four/There’s always more,” said Hat, tipping up his wineglass.

  “What are the sticks and weeds in the salad?” asked Cassie.

  “Sticks and weeds?” Coralinda, flushed from the kitchen, laughed. “Those are herbs and bean sprouts, Cassie.”

  “Look like sticks and weeds,” commented Cassie.

  Cassie looked closely at Cousin Coralinda. What was it that was different? She still wore feathers, but the only ones in sight were feather earrings, slightly worn, that made her look a bit as if she were molting. There was something different. Something else.

  The writer took Baby Binnie on his lap, where she sat staring at him for a long time.

  “Baby Binnie, Skinny Binnie,” sang the writer, not embarrassed at all. Baby Binnie grinned, her three and a half teeth making her look like a carved pumpkin.

  “Ratch,” said Baby Binnie to the writer.

  “Ratch is right,” said the writer, smiling back at Binnie.

  “Whatever is that in the bathroom?” asked James, coming into the kitchen.

  “What do you mean? What’s there?” asked Cassie’s mother.

  “It looks to me,” said Gran, “like a sheet for questions and answers. Put there, I suppose, by someone who wishes to know more. A good idea, I might say.”

  Cassie grinned at Gran.

  “You know I put it there,” she said.

  “It did look like your handwriting,” said James, smiling.

  “And I was very tired of writing answers on toilet paper,” joked John Thomas.

  The writer said nothing, but smiled at Cassie from across the table. He turned to Cassie’s father.

  “Your boat is beautiful,” he said.

  Cassie saw that her father was pleased.

  “You’ve seen her? Yes, she is beautiful. You like boats?”

  The writer nodded. “Never had much of a chance to use them. I grew up in the west, where there is not much water.”

  Beautiful? Cassie thought about her father’s boat, solid and gray with painted decks, the smell of fish never washed away, the windows of the wheelhouse blurred and sticky with salt spray.

  Cassie’s father sat back and took a sip of his wine. He looked past everyone there, as if reaching for something far away. “I’ve loved boats forever,” he said softly. “When I was seven, I built a raft out of building boards and old nails. Launched it on the river.”

  Cassie studied him. She had hardly ever thought of him as a boy of seven. What did he look like then? Was he tall or short, curly haired, fair, sad, happy? Was he the same person as now?

  After dinner they had cookies and raisin cake on the porch, the fading sunlight turning the sky the old gold color of late afternoon. It touched the faces of everyone, making them seem unreal, like old photographs: Gran, leaning back in a wicker chair, sipping tea from a china cup; Cassie’s brothers arguing gently over the last piece of cake; her mother and father, sitting close together on the couch, the backs of their hands touching; Baby Binnie, sitting at the foot of the steps, eating sand with a spoon. The writer leaned over to say something to Coralinda, and she bent forward eagerly, her hair loose, brushing her cheek. It was then that Cassie saw just what it was that was different about Coralinda. She looked at Margaret Mary and knew, by her look, that Margaret Mary had seen too. Looking more closely, Cassie saw what it was. Cousin Coralinda looked much less like a horse than usual tonight. Cassie wondered if the writer noticed.

  After dinner, everyone gone to bed, the writer gone home to his very own sheets and towels, Cassie walked quietly into the upstairs bathroom and turned on the light. There, on the sheet of paper, was something written that had not been there before. The writing was new, tall and straight. Cassie smiled. She knew who had written it. She came closer to read:

  Each of us has a space of his own. We carry it around as close as skin, as private as our dreams. What makes you think you don’t have your own, too?

  Cassie’s smiled faded. What did that mean? It was just like the writer to answer a question with another question, thought Cassie.

  “He must have been a teacher once,” she announced right out loud in the bathroom. No quick answers after all, thought Cassie unhappily. And she turned off the light, leaving herself and the questions in the dark.

  11

  Cocoons

  CASSIE PASSED BY the writer’s cottage often, sometimes with real errands, most times with imaginary ones. Some days she could see him at his typewriter by the window, punching away in a two-fingered assault. Other days he was pacing and speaking out loud, gesturing, to no one. But sometimes his listeners were real. Once, Cassie had peered in the window to a scene of littered papers, Baby Binnie in the middle with a pan and a wooden spoon, the writer reading something to Cousin Coralinda. Peering closer, Cassie could see Coralinda, leaning forward as she had at the family dinner, chin in hand, looking rapt—one of Cassie’s new words. There were few feathers to be seen, except on Coralinda’s shoes. But, looking at the writer, Cassie saw with a prickling sense of dread that he had a feather stuck behind his ear where a pencil might be. Should be. Cassie waited a long time, standing behind a tree, then sitting, until at long last the writer emerged, holding Baby Binnie easily in one arm, his other arm resting gently across Coralinda’s shoulders. They had walked along the path, passing whisper near to Cassie.

  “It’s the character I’m worried about, Cor . . .”

  “But there’s no need . . .” Cousin Coralinda’s voice came, soft.

  “Are you sure?” The writer’s voice, worried.

  “Namnit,” announced Baby Binnie, her hands buried in the writer’s hair.

  Ask me, Cassie cried out silently. Ask me. They had disappeared from view then, down the path to Cousin Coralinda’s cottage, and Cassie had sat and waited, as if still under the tablecloth. But no one came for her to listen to. Only a chickadee, fearless and friendly, working its way down a branch.

  Today, Cassie heard the writer mumbling to himself as he carried a brown paper bag of sunflower seeds for the feeder. Cassie waited behind a tree, watching as he emptied a few seeds into his hand. He stood, hand out, still as a rock, and waited for a chickadee to eat them. Cassie felt a small sound of wings next to her head, and she slowly raised her head to see the bird sit on a branch and watch. And then, there was the sound of the bird leaving the branch. The writer smiled as the chickadee sat for a moment on his hand, then, seed in his beak, he flew off above their heads.

  The writer saw Cassie, waiting by the tree, and he smiled and beckoned to her.

  “Come, join the chickadees in dinner.” He popped a sunflower seed in his mouth. “And me in tea?” He turned and walked up the front porch steps.

  “What are you doing out here?” asked Cassie. “You should be writing.”

  “Writing, dear Cass,” said the writer, “is only one part of living, you know. Would you deny me the pleasures of bird life, snacks, nature, the world, and the pleasure of your company?”

  “Were you ever a teacher?” asked Cassie abruptly.

  The writer laughed. “You can tell, eh?” He disappeared inside the cottage and Cassie stood by the door, looking at the litter. There were books and papers, one paper nearly falling off the table. Cassie stepped gingerly over a pile of books and walked, tiptoe, through a paper path. There was a soft crunching noise under her foot, and she looked down to see a splintered yellow pencil.

  The writer came in from the kitchen, then, managing to carry two cups and a kettle of hot water.

  “We’ll have to share a tea bag,” he announced, speaking strangely because the tag end of the tea bag was in his mouth.

  Cassie hated tea. Not hated, actually. She found it dull and horrible and in need of something such as four teaspoons of sugar. Somehow, though, the idea of sharing a tea bag with the writer made it sound more interesting. Almost intimate. Or
exotic. He put down the cups and the teapot on a pile of papers, and Cassie looked around. There was a small leftover fire smouldering in the fireplace. She got up and went to stand there, feeling the sudden warmth on her legs. She looked up to the mantel, where there was a cup filled with feathers. The feathers, Cassie observed, did not belong to chickadees or goldfinches or any other birds that Cassie knew of. She frowned and turned around.

  “She must be shedding,” said Cassie curtly. “She’s losing all her feathers.”

  The writer smiled. “Molting, I think the word is,” he said, looking thoughtful. “Actually, I would prefer to call it emerging.”

  “Emerging?” asked Cassie.

  The writer poured the tea into two cups and nodded, leaning back in his writing chair, looking for all the world as if he knew everything. Cassie sat down and put her hands around the warm teacup.

  “We all”—he peered at Cassie—“you, too, do a lot of emerging. Like butterflies. Like moths from cocoons. Sometimes we don’t even know we’re doing it.”

  “How can we do that?” asked Cassie, spooning a fifth teaspoon of sugar into her tea that was too strong. “I mean without knowing it.”

  The writer drank some tea, making a loud slurping noise, and they laughed.

  “Well, you emerged from babyhood into childhood hardly even thinking about it, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Cassie thought a moment. “That’s true, I guess,” she said slowly. “I did run away once,” she added.

  He nodded. “Me, too. When I was a child, that is. It gets a bit harder to run away when you’re older. So sometimes we build cocoons around us and linger inside awhile.”

  Cassie leaned back in her chair and thought about her tablecloth and the door under the back stairs and being up in trees looking down. She remembered her mother’s words to Coralinda when Cassie had hidden. There was something here she didn’t understand but almost did. Like remembering only half of a joke or only the beginning of a story. And it all had to do with feathers and wearing hats and saying rhymes. And hiding, and inside and outside. And emerging.

  “Why is it,” said Cassie, peering over her teacup, “that I like to hear what you say even though I don’t understand what you’re saying at all?”

  The writer laughed, and so did Cassie. And the two of them sat and sipped terrible tea in silence until the sun had slipped down past the dunes.

  12

  Catching Snow

  “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN LOVE, Margaret Mary?” asked Cassie. She never took her eyes off the rowboat in the inlet and the two figures in the boat.

  “Certainly,” said Margaret Mary. She slurped a sour ball, moving it from one cheek to the other.

  The one rowing the boat was not paying attention, and the boat jigged back and forth in a halfhearted way. It might have been funny if it had been anyone other than the writer rowing with Cousin Coralinda.

  “I thought he was supposed to be writing,” Cassie muttered grumpily.

  Margaret Mary looked quickly at Cassie, then back out to the boat.

  “The first time I was in love,” she began, “was with Timothy Farquat-Sperry. Imagine! Margaret Mary Farquat-Sperry! I think it was his name I loved. And of course his yo-yo that glowed in the dark.”

  “Well, I’ve never loved anyone ’til now,” said Cassie, crossing her fingers behind her back because she’d suddenly remembered Mr. Bagg.

  Margaret Mary sighed. “You’d best be careful,” she said wisely. “I once read my Aunt Cecily’s romance magazines. They were full of pain and anguish.”

  “Anguish?” said Cassie, studying the bulge in Margaret Mary’s right cheek. “What’s anguish?”

  “Like pain, I think,” said Margaret Mary, “but seven times worse. I remember best ‘Teens in Trouble.’ It was packed with anguish.” Margaret Mary smiled. “My mum says that the only thing worse than a teen in trouble is more than one teen in trouble.”

  Cassie laughed. “Your mom said that?” Cassie was surprised. “Your mom doesn’t seem the type to say that.”

  “Well,” said Margaret Mary, getting up and brushing sand from her pants and shirt, “there are many surprises in life. Nothing is much like it first appears.”

  “Yes,” said Cassie, putting her chin in her hand and looking out at the rowboat, “I know.”

  She watched the rowboat for a long time, long after Margaret Mary had gone home to check her mother’s slop sauce, simmering on the stove. Finally, shaking her head as if shaking away any anguish that might be lurking there, she went to find her mother.

  Cassie found a paint scraper and helped her mother scrape around the windows of the cottage nearest the inlet. It was hard work. But worse than hard work, Cassie could still see the reflection of the rowboat in the window glass.

  “Why are we working so hard on these cottages anyway?” she asked in a loud voice. “The renters will probably be loud and have naked parties.”

  Cassie’s mother laughed.

  “That might be nice,” she said, teasing, putting her hand on Cassie’s cheek. She picked up the hedge clippers and began cutting back the sumac that grew close to the cottage.

  Cassie watched her mother. She remembered when late one night her mother and father ran down to the sea with no clothes on. They swam, and when they came from the water, their bodies glistening like seals in the moonlight, they had put their arms around each other. It wasn’t proper, thought Cassie, not for them, not for any passing fisherman to see, much less for their very own daughter with her nose pressed against the window glass, watching.

  Gran came into the yard, carrying a wooden box and an easel, steering Baby Binnie in front of her. Binnie walked precariously on tiptoes, first one way, then the other, like a drunk dancer. Suddenly she sat down hard with a surprised look on her face.

  Cassie got down from the small stepladder and sat in front of Binnie.

  “Say Cass,” she whispered. “Please. Say Cass.”

  “Poodee,” said Baby Binnie, deciding not to cry about sitting down hard. She smiled broadly at Cassie.

  Gran unloaded the box and easel.

  “Today I’m going to start painting,” she said.

  Cassie peered into the box. “You mean a picture?” said Cassie. “What are you going to paint?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Don’t know! You have to know what you’re going to paint before you paint it,” insisted Cassie.

  “Now who made that rule?” asked Gran. “That’s downright boring.”

  “Well, make it something beautiful,” said Cassie grumpily. “I’m tired of all this.” She stared out at the dunes and the sea.

  Gran sighed. “I just wish I could make it like ‘all of this.’”

  Cassie stared at Gran.

  “How come you don’t see things the way they are?” she asked.

  Gran straightened up from her paint box. “My fault, eh Cassie? Tell me, just how are things? How are things?”

  A sudden picture of James flashed through Cassie’s head. She remembered a long time ago—or was it just a week or two?—James standing in front of the dark kitchen window and asking Cassie, “And what is everyone else like, Cass?” She had had no answers for James then. And now she had no answer for Gran. She thought about the question and answer sheet in the upstairs bathroom. No answers anywhere, thought Cassie. And suddenly, because there seemed to be nothing left to do, Cassie surprised herself by bursting into tears. Gran looked up, her eyebrows arched, as Cassie leaned her face against a tree. After a moment, Gran put down her paint box and turned Cassie around, taking her in her arms.

  “Dear Cass,” murmured Gran. “Don’t you know, child, that everyone has a different way of looking at things? It’s as if we all have eyeglasses to look through—eyeglasses of our own.” Gran pulled back a bit and looked down at Cassie. “Now Binnie there . . .” Baby Binnie, hearing her name, looked up and smiled at Gran. “She’s too young to look through anyone else’s glasses. But you, Cass, are growing u
p. Learning how to look through other people’s eyeglasses. Do you see?”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “Of course not,” said Gran. “You don’t have to be sure. It’s not easy, this learning to see the world the way others see it. Some grown-ups never learn.” She looked at Cassie, hesitating. “Papa never learned it.”

  “Papa!” Cassie took a step backward. “But Papa was perfect!”

  “Perfect?” Gran smiled. “Never perfect, Cassie. There were moments of being perfect, perhaps. Moments for us all. But never perfect all the time, thank goodness.”

  The old memory was there again in front of Cassie’s eyes. Papa in the bed, calling after Cassie. Cassie yelling at him, stamping her foot.

  “Don’t you remember, Cass, Papa always wishing for things to be the way he thought they ought to be? Angry, unhappy because they weren’t. Don’t you remember catching snow with Papa during the first snowfall?”

  Cassie pushed the memory away and remembered running outside with Papa, the snow falling densely, Cassie trying to catch the flakes on her mitten. Furious because they wouldn’t stay on her hand.

  “Remember?” asked Gran. “You wanted them to stay perfect forever.”

  Cassie nodded, remembering.

  “Well, Papa wished for the same,” said Gran. “He never learned that most things are only there for a moment, quite perfect and fine, like snow.”

  Catching snow. Cassie thought about it as she watched Gran open her paint box and set up her easel. Catching snow. She felt a gentle tugging at her shirt, and looked down to see Baby Binnie holding out her arms. Cassie smiled and picked her up, and Binnie put her plump arms around Cassie’s neck, hanging on tightly, laying her head on Cassie’s shoulder.

  “Oh Binnie,” whispered Cassie, kissing Binnie’s soft ear. “Catching snow. Just what do you think about catching snow, Binnie?”

  Baby Binnie sighed and settled closer into Cassie’s neck.