The Dixons live in a rambling apartment on East Ninety-fourth right off the park. Dixon’s daughter Becky is my best friend. Anna and Becky’s older sister Julia are the same age, but they’ve never really clicked. Julia is a gymnast. Two years ago, their mother left them to join a commune. Becky and I spend most of our time unsupervised, playing cat’s cradle, going into Central Park on roller skates, coming up with disgusting recipes we force each other to eat. This morning we made shakes in the blender out of brewers’ yeast and instant strawberry pudding mix. Dixon says he doesn’t give a shit, as long as we eat. The last time Mum left us at Dixon’s he took us to see Deliverance at the Trans Lux. We ran around the rest of the weekend screaming, “Squeal like a pig.” Mum had a fit, but Dixon told her to stop being so narrow-minded and puritanical. He’s the only person who gets to talk to her like that.
A strange quiet has come over the city. Out the window there is nothing but a blinding flurry of white. I listen to the clanging of hot steam in the pipes as they expand and contract. The apartment is claustrophobic with dry heat, and the metal radiator cover burns the fronts of my legs as I lean forward, using all my weight to inch open the heavy window, but it refuses to budge.
“Can someone please help me? I need air.” But no one moves. We are playing Monopoly, and Anna has just landed on Marvin Gardens. She needs to think.
Dixon and his new wife Andrea have been in their room all morning with the door shut. “They have a water bed,” Becky says, as if this explains everything. Andrea and Dixon met at a sweat lodge in New Mexico. Andrea is six months pregnant. They’re pretty sure it’s his.
“I don’t mind her,” Becky says when Mum asks what she thinks of her new stepmother.
“I think she’s nice,” I say.
“Nice?” My mother looks as though she’s just swallowed an olive pit.
“Why is that bad?” I ask.
“Nice is the enemy of interesting.”
“She talks to us like we’re grown-ups, which is pretty cool,” Becky says.
“Well, you’re not. You’re eleven,” Mum says to Becky.
“The other night at dinner she asked me whether I was excited to begin menstruating,” Becky says.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen my mother at a loss for words.
“Elle,” Anna calls out now, “it’s your turn.” I sit down next to her on the living room floor and roll the dice. The wood floors smell good to me. The same butcher’s wax my mother uses.
I’m looking down the long hallway that leads to the bedrooms, trying to decide whether I should use my Get Out of Jail Free card, when a door opens. Dixon steps into the hall, naked. He scratches his balls absent-mindedly. Behind him, Andrea emerges. She arches her back like a cat, stretches her arms up in the air. “We just had such a good fuck,” she says. The light is dim, but we can see everything—her massive red bush, her frizzy Janis Joplin hair, her satisfied smile.
Dixon walks past us across the living room, squats down next to the turntable, and places the needle on an album. I can see dark hair in the crack of his behind.
“Listen to the backing vocals on this track,” he says. “Clapton is a genius.”
I stare at the miniature silver wheelbarrow in my hand, wishing I could disappear into the floor.
Becky shoves me, just a bit too hard. “Are you going or not?”
8
12:45 P.M.
“Coming in?” Peter asks.
“Five minutes. I need to recover after crossing the fucking Sahara.” I grab the cooler from him and drink from the spout.
“That’s attractive,” Peter says. “My wife was raised by wolves.”
Jonas laughs. “I know. I was one of them.”
Peter hands me the SPF 50 sun block. “Can you do my back?”
I kneel behind him and squeeze sun block into my hand. Somehow he has already managed to get sand on the tube, and I’m irritated by the feeling of grit as I rub the cream onto his shoulders. Jonas watches as I stroke Peter’s skin.
“There.” I give Peter’s back a pat for good measure. “You are officially blocked.” I wipe my hands off on a towel and crawl into the shade of the tent. “Better,” I say.
Peter gets to his feet and grabs a boogie board. “Don’t be long. I don’t want to go pruney waiting for you.”
The moment Peter leaves, I wish I’d gone with him, because now Jonas and I are alone, and I have never felt more uncomfortable in my life. We’ve been together on this beach a thousand times since we were kids, walked the tide line looking for sea urchins and toenail shells, spied on creepy naked Germans from up in the dunes, wondered what it would be like to drown at sea. But right now, right here, huddled in the shade of his tent, I feel like I’m with a complete stranger.
There’s a small mesh window in the side panel of the tent. I watch Jonas through it, sitting inches away from me but completely separate. He’s concentrating—drawing something in the sand with the edge of a shell. I can’t make out what it is from this angle.
“Where’s young Jack?” he asks without looking up.
“Protesting.”
“Protesting what?”
“I wouldn’t give him my car.”
“Why not?”
“He was being a complete asshole,” I say, and he laughs. Gina waves to us from the break, beckoning. Jonas waves back. He leans in to the mesh window. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Then will you hear my confession?”
“I’m not sure three Hail Marys are going to help much,” I say.
He presses the palm of his hand against the mesh. “Elle—”
“Don’t,” I say. But I put my hand up against his. We sit like this, silent, unmoving, palm to palm through the fine mesh.
“I’ve been in love with you since I was eight.”
“That’s a lie,” I say.
1977. August, the Back Woods.
In the tree cover above me, there’s a window. I lie on the mossy banks of a stream, gazing up at the almost perfectly-square patch of sky. One minute it’s solid blue, the next a cloud floats past like a painting on the ceiling of a church. A sea gull swings into frame. I can hear its searching, mournful cries long after it disappears from view. I reach into my pocket and grab a Tootsie Roll. This is where I come almost every day now. Occasionally my mother asks me where I’ve been and I say, “Around,” and she seems fine with that. I could be hitchhiking into town with a serial killer and she wouldn’t notice. It’s all Leo and Anna, all the time. They argue about everything. It’s been like this since Leo and Mum got married. I dread sitting down at the table for dinner. It starts out okay—Leo lecturing us about China or why the Pentagon Papers are still relevant. But pretty soon he starts in on Anna. He doesn’t approve of her friend Lindsay: she dresses like a hooker; she’s overdeveloped and under-intelligent; she thought the Khmer Rouge was a lipstick color; her parents voted for Gerald Ford. Why did Anna get a C+ in math? How can she sit there without helping while her mother serves us? Her skirt is too short. “Why are you looking, creep?” Anna says, and when he gets up out of his chair, she runs to her room and locks the door.
“It’s just hormones,” my mother tells Leo, trying to smooth things over between them. “All teenagers are a nightmare. And girls are worse. Wait until Rosemary hits puberty.” He has promised to make an effort. But it’s been worse since we got to the woods. Leo has decided to “put his foot down.” He sends Anna to our cabin if she back-talks, and Mum refuses to interfere. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be constantly refereeing,” she says to Anna. Anna lies on her bed refusing to cry, and yells at me if I try to come in. One morning in July, Anna and Leo were having such a humongous fight at breakfast that Mum threw an egg at the kitchen wall. “I honestly cannot take another minute of this. I’m going next door to see my father and Pamela.” She handed me a ba
nana. “I recommend you find somewhere else to be for the day if you don’t want to go deaf.”
I was walking to the ocean, thinking about how I was going to poison Leo—how I’d have to be the one to save Anna since Mum wouldn’t—when I tripped on a root and tore my flip-flop apart. I sat down on the path to shove the Y back into the buttonhole. Under the low-hanging branches of the trees was a faint trail—probably a deer path. I crawled into the woods and followed the trail until it dwindled and dead-ended in a thicket of catbrier. I was turning back when I noticed the sound of running water. Which made no sense, because everyone knows there’s no running water in this part of the woods. That’s why the Pilgrims kept going to Plymouth after they landed on the Cape. I pulled the brambles aside bunch by bunch with my towel, stepped through the tangle, trying not to scratch my legs too badly, and emerged from the overgrowth into a small clearing. In the center was a freshwater spring, burbling out of the ground into a narrow stream. The looming trees had backed away, leaving a carpet of velvet moss below. I lay down on the bank and closed my eyes. Poison might be too obvious, I thought. Maybe Anna and I should run away from home, move here. We could build a tree house with a platform and a roof made out of branches. We’d have fresh water; we could catch fish on the beach—early, before anyone else was awake; collect cranberries and wild blueberries so we wouldn’t get scurvy. I started to make a list in my head of the supplies we’d need: empty Medaglia d’Oro cans with plastic lids for watertight storage, wooden matches, candles, fishhooks and line, a hammer and nails, a cake of soap, two forks, a change of underwear, sleeping bags, bug spray. Mum was going to be sorry she let Leo punish Anna and never took Anna’s side. Maybe not right away, but eventually she would miss us.
* * *
—
But it’s almost Labor Day now, and the only survival supplies I have managed to collect are two rusty coffee cans, an old pair of pliers and a few candle stubs. High above me, a flock of birds write a V for victory, like a fleeting thought winging its way away across the chipped blue sky. A shadow falls across my face. I freeze. Try to make myself invisible.
“Hello.” A small boy—maybe seven or eight—is looking down at me, his approach so silent I never heard him coming. He has thick black hair that reaches his shoulders. Pale green eyes. He’s barefoot. “I’m Jonas,” he says. “I’m lost.” He doesn’t seem upset or scared.
“Elle,” I say. I’ve seen his family on the beach. His mother is a frizzy-haired woman who yells at us if we leave our apple cores in the sand. They live somewhere in the Back Woods.
“I was following the osprey,” he says, as if that explains everything. He sits down next to me on the mossy bank and looks up at the sky. For a long time, neither of us speaks. I listen to the bristling woods, springwater clipping over rocks. I know Jonas is there, but somehow he makes himself a shadow.
“It’s a window,” he says after a while.
“I know.” I stand up and wipe crumbs of soil off the butt of my jean shorts. “We should get back.”
“Yes,” he says, with a small, serious expression. “My mother will be frantic.”
I want to laugh, but instead I take his hand, walk him down the path, and return him to his mother, who thanks me with what feels like reproach.
12:50 P.M.
“It’s not a lie.”
Finn, Maddy, and Gina have waded out beyond the shoals to the edge of the sandbar, the abrupt drop of the ocean floor. Behind them, Peter splashes forward, dragging his boogie board over the crests. I want to cry.
“Yes. It is. That night at the beach picnic, the very first time I met Gina? You made a huge point of telling me you had fallen in love with Gina and were ‘thankfully’ one hundred percent over me. And that was probably twenty years ago. So.”
“I only said that to hurt you.”
“I remember exactly where I was standing. Which, oddly, was on this beach. I even remember what I was wearing. I remember what you were wearing. I felt as though my body had suddenly been hollowed out—the way your stomach drops on a roller coaster.”
“You were wearing jeans,” Jonas says softly. “The cuffs were wet.”
Maddy catches a wave, surfs it all the way to shore. When she hits sand, she stands, does a triumphant little dance before racing back into the sea.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What have we done?” I am choked with dismay. For then. For now. For all of it.
“What we should have done a long long time ago.”
“No,” I say.
“Last night was the best night of my life. The first night.”
I shake my head, my entire body a sob. “It was already too late for this years ago.”
He pulls his hand away from mine. I feel as though I’ve been slapped—desperate now to have him back. Then something brushes my leg. Jonas has tunneled his hand under the bottom of the tent. He runs his hand up my leg, finds the inside of my thigh. “I like this part of you,” he says.
“Stop that.” I swat his hand away.
“Soft, baby skin.” His fingers tug at my bathing suit.
“I’m serious, Jonas. They’re right there. I can see the kids.”
“They’re a hundred yards out. Lie down. Close your eyes. I’ll keep watch.”
“No,” I say. But I drape my towel over my hips, lie back on the sand. Footsteps crunch past the nylon tent behind my head. I listen to a loose Velcro flap scratch-scratching across the sand. The back-and-forth thwack of a rubber ball hitting wooden paddles. A drifting smell of coconut oil.
Jonas pulls my bathing suit bottom aside, traces the rim of me, presses just the tip of his finger inside me.
“Gina’s right there,” I whisper. “Peter.”
“Shhh . . .” he says. “Way, way out. Beyond the break. I’m staring at your husband right now.” He plunges his finger inside me, draws it out so slowly I can barely breathe, opens me up with his fingertips. I moan, pray the wind has carried away the sound. He finger-fucks me then, hard and fast. I move my hips, shoving myself up and down on his fingers, wanting his whole hand inside me. I am on a crowded beach. My children are playing in the waves. And the thought of Gina and Peter a skipping stone’s throw away makes me more turned on than I have ever been in my life.
“Gina’s getting out of the water,” Jonas whispers. He pinches my clitoris hard between his fingers. I come in a hundred shudders, swallowing a scream as she walks up the beach toward us.
“It’s not too late,” he says. He wipes his hand in the sand, gets up, and goes to join his wife.
9
1978. September, New York.
The doldrums between the end of summer and the beginning of school. It’s a day to buy new shoes at Stride Rite—get a free salted pretzel and a comic. No thunderstorms and lightning, no hail or brimstone—just a still, overcast day. But today Anna is being sent away to boarding school in New Hampshire for high school. Her bus leaves at noon from the corner of Seventy-ninth and Lex. The week we got back to the city, Leo was coming home from a gig when he saw Anna and her friend Lindsay standing on our corner begging for change. They were telling a man in a suit they had been mugged and needed money to get a bus home. The man fished a ten out of his pocket and told the girls to take a taxi. Leo waited until the man was gone before stepping out of the shadows.
“Anna,” he asked benignly, “what are you doing out here? It’s late. Shouldn’t you be upstairs?”
“I was walking Lindsay to the bus stop,” Anna said.
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s because you don’t think,” Anna said.
“I saw what you were doing.”
“Oh, really? What?”
“Lying. Stealing. Acting like a couple of cheap hookers on Fourteenth Street.”
“You’re such a pervert,” Anna said.
He put out his hand. “Give me the money. Now. You
r mother and I will discuss what to do with you.”
“He thinks he can tell me what to do,” Anna said to Lindsay, sneering. “But he’s not my father. Thank god. Let’s get out of here.”
“Your father is gone,” Leo said.
“He’s not gone. He’s living in London.”
“If he wanted to see you, he would.”
“Fuck you,” Anna said. “Oh, wait, that’s what you want to do anyway, isn’t it?”
Leo says he doesn’t remember raising his hand to slap her across the face, but Lindsay told me he had this look, like he wanted to hurt her. Now every time Leo sees her, he says he feels like a monster. One of them has to go. So, it will be Anna. I’m okay she’s leaving. Last week she caught me trying on one of her bras and she ripped my summer reading assignment in half. But I’m sad for her, too. Because I know she’s scared and homesick, even before she’s left. And I know she wishes our mother had chosen her.
I sit on the edge of her bed and watch while she packs the last few things into her suitcase. I pick up a pair of click-clacks from her doorknob.
“Don’t touch my stuff.” She grabs them from me and throws them into the back of her closet. “And if you wear any of my clothes, I’ll kill you.”
“Can I have this?” I pull an old issue of Tiger Beat out of her wastebasket. Donny Osmond stares at me.
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