Dad has packed us a picnic: ham-and-tomato sandwiches, pears, sweet pickles, a bottle of beer for him, a Yoo-hoo for me. He’s in a great mood.
“I couldn’t see the back of Joanne fast enough, but I am sorry to lose Dwight and Nancy. They’ve been good to me. We’ll stop somewhere first to have our lunch. I don’t want to turn up early.”
“I loved that house. It had the nicest smell.”
“Nancy will be glad to see you. She’s been in a bit of a blue patch since Frank went away to college.”
I’m relieved Frank won’t be there. The thought of his moist upper lip, his revolting thick-bodied snake, still makes me nauseous. “I haven’t seen them in so long. Anna and I used to stay there all the time.”
“Not all the time,” Dad says. He pulls off into the parking lot of the Tarrytown train station. “There’s a decent little picnic area on the other side of the tracks.”
As I get out of the car, something sad shudders through me, indistinct but clear. It’s been years since I’ve been here, but this is the stop where Anna and I would get off the Harlem-Hudson Line when we came to visit Dad and Joanne before they moved to London—the stop where we learned not to expect to see more of our father than the short car ride to and from the Burkes’ house.
We cross the tracks and find a bench overlooking the Hudson. The river is shrugging off the last of winter, stretching itself awake for spring. I watch a large branch moving downstream, pulled by the slow, heavy current. My father fishes his old Swiss Army Knife out of his pocket, pries out the bottle opener, and opens his beer. I’ve always loved his knife—its hidden treasures: the teensy pair of scissors, the nail file, the doll-sized saw. He pulls out the large blade and begins peeling a ripe pear in a tight, precise spiral.
“Why did we stop staying with the Burkes, Dad?”
“Because I wanted my girls with me.”
“Then why did you always leave us there?”
“Well,” he says, “that was Joanne.” He slices off a piece of pear and offers it to me on the blade of the knife. “Careful. That blade is sharper than it looks. There’s a hunk of Muenster in the bag.”
With my father, everything is always someone else’s fault.
“Have I ever told you the story of how I got this scar?” He holds up his thumb. Leans in. A dramatic pause. My father doesn’t tell stories, he performs them. Narrates. Puffs up like a frigate bird, red and barrel-chested. Waits for his audience to settle in. Usually, when he’s repeating a story, I pretend I’ve never heard it before. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. But right now all I want to do is pinprick him. Deflate him. Yes, you’ve told it to me about twenty times.
“Pop gave me this knife when I turned ten. Told me knives were for men, not boys—to use it with respect. I cut my thumb wide open the very first time I used it. Trying to pry the cap off a bottle of cola with that same blade. Had to get twelve stitches. Blood all over the damn shop. Like a jugular vein. Pop took the knife away for a year. Told me he’d made a grave error. Said a boy who can’t tell the difference between a bottle opener and a blade was just masquerading as a man. That was a powerful lesson.” Behind him, a train slows to approach the station, heading south. “Your grandfather taught me to whittle, you know. And to shoot straight. Do you remember that little wooden turtle I made for you?”
I shake my head no, though it is on the shelf above my bed, where it always is. I hand my father the cheese, take a sandwich from the picnic bag. I pull off the top slice of bread. It is stained wet with pink tomato juice. One by one, I pick off the seeds, flick them into the grass. On the river, a sailboat fights the current.
* * *
—
We pull into the Burkes’ circular gravel driveway at two on the dot.
“Perfect timing,” Dad says, pleased with himself.
A chocolate Lab is lying on the front porch, napping in a patch of sun. It ambles over, rubs against my father’s leg, then stands there motionless, as if that simple gesture has left it stunned.
“Hello, old girl,” Dad says, patting her. “You remember Cora?” he asks me.
“The puppy?”
“She’s an ancient lady now. Dog years.” He knocks on the door. “Hello-o?” he calls out. “Nancy? Dwight? Anybody home?” But there is only the silent house. “Nancy’s car is here. She must be gardening out back.” He opens the front door and we let ourselves in.
Everything is exactly as I remember it: the shiny brass tongs and cinder scoop for ashes leaning against the white brick fireplace. The WASPy threadbare wingbacks, worn Persian rug. A vase of garden peonies sits on the coffee table, loose petals strewn over art books.
“Hello, hello?” Dad calls out, again. I follow him into the kitchen. The Mr. Coffee has been left on, giving off the faint sour odor of burnt coffee. My father turns off the machine, holds the glass pot under the tap. It hisses and steams as water hits the caramelized ring, tinting the water brown.
“She’s not in the garden. They must be out for a walk. I’ll start bringing my boxes down from the attic. Go have a look at your old room.”
“Maybe we should wait. It feels like we’re trespassing.”
“The Burkes are family, Joanne or no Joanne.”
The hidden door that leads to our room is open. I pause halfway up the wooden staircase on the landing where Anna and I used to sit and play with our dolls, before heading upstairs. Nothing has changed—the same flowered pillowcases we used when I was six, the same lace doilies on the bureaus. Dotted swiss bedspreads. I picture Frank’s agonized face, the day we found his hamster Goldie squashed behind Anna’s bed. The way he cried. His high-pitched gurgle. Sun streams in through the mullioned windows. Above the dour rock face, the sky is brilliant. Nancy’s rhododendrons are in bloom. Nothing has changed, and yet now our old room feels sad and hollow, one-dimensional—like a stage set for a happy childhood, which, when you look behind it, reveals itself to be false walls and empty spaces. Suddenly all I want is to be with my father.
Downstairs in the pantry, I stop in front of the door to Frank’s old hamster room. A yellowing sign in faded Magic Marker is still tacked to the door: do not enter on pain of death. I turn the knob, step into the forbidden, windowless room. My eyes take a little while to adjust. It’s a storage room now, the walls stacked high with crates. Frank’s hamster cages are gone. But in the far corner, illuminated by the pale glow of neon, is a glass aquarium. It is five times larger than the one I remember. As I walk toward it, I see a subtle shift, a movement, sinuous, reptilian. I back out of the room.
Nancy is sitting at the kitchen table, slicing apples. “Well hello, dear,” she says brightly. “There you are.”
I feel caught in the spotlight of her benign smile.
She puts down an apple core and wipes her hands on her apron. “Hasn’t Waldo gotten big?”
“We knocked.” I say. “Dad said it would be okay to start moving his things.”
“Of course, dear. I lay down for a quick catnap. You’ve certainly blossomed into a lovely young woman. You must be fifteen by now.”
“Thirteen—I’ll be fourteen in September.”
“I imagine you’re thirsty after that drive. I made iced tea. Dwight should be back any minute now. He drove down the hill to return a book to his friend Carter Ashe.” She goes to the refrigerator and stands there without opening it, gives her head a little shake as if she’s trying to get rid of a passing thought. “He missed luncheon,” she says. “You must be thirsty. I made iced tea.”
* * *
—
I find my father in the attic surrounded by boxes and piles of old photographs. The air is hot, stuffy. It smells of the past.
“Have a look at these.” He passes me a thick manila envelope. “All my old contact sheets and negatives. There are some wonderful ones of your mother.”
I pull out the black-and-whit
e contact sheets and look through them. Endless photos of my mother in a cocktail dress and pearls, lying on a sofa, smiling into the camera. Anna in the bathtub, covered in soapsuds, with a colander on her head. Me and Mum in the playground. Mum is pushing me on the baby swings; one of my red buckle-up shoes has fallen off. At the bottom of the stack, I find a series of photos of the four of us. We are on the steps of the Natural History Museum, Anna and I in matching smocked dresses and Mary Janes. Dad is carrying me on his shoulders. I have no memory of any of it.
In the shadows of an eave, pushed up against the crawl space, are three open boxes with my father’s name scrawled across them in black marker. They are filled with record albums. His collection of 78s in brown paper envelopes, LPs in worn cardboard covers. I run my finger across their spines. I like the sound it makes. I remember these.
My father picks up a faded color photograph from the pile in front of him. “Come look at this one.”
It is a photo of Dad with Mum. They look so young. They are in a field. My mother is lying in the grass, her head resting on my father’s lap. She’s wearing sailor shorts and a frilly white blouse, its top three buttons unbuttoned. Her eyes are closed. He is staring down at her. He looks happy in a way I do not recognize. Behind them, in the distance, a volcano rises up into a faded sky.
“Acatenango.” He points to the volcano. “Your mother and I flew to Guatemala so I could meet your grandmother Nanette and your uncle Austin. What a disaster that was. You never met her, did you?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. When I was a few months old.”
My father nods. “Of course. It was while you were still in the hospital. After your operation. She came for Christmas. Brought me an embroidered folkloric tapestry of Mary and Joseph riding a donkey. She tried to claim it was a valuable Mayan relic,” he laughs. “Matter of fact, it’s probably at the bottom of one of these boxes. She was a force of nature, that woman. Couldn’t stand me. Said your mother was marrying down.” He puts the photo back on the pile. “She was right, of course. Your mother was way out of my league.” He pauses. “Wallace and Leo seem very happy.”
“I guess.”
He takes the photo from me. Stares at it for a long time. “I was so in love with your mother.”
“So, what happened? I mean, you’re the one who left.”
“Believe me, that was the last thing in the world I wanted.”
“Then why did you get divorced?”
“I suppose your mother finally realized Nanette was right about me.” He laughs, but I can tell there’s a part of him that believes it’s true.
“That’s completely idiotic,” I say. “And Nanette sounds like a bitch.”
Dad smiles. “Well, about that, Miss Elle, you are right.” He stands up, dusts off his trousers. “Let’s load this stuff up and get the hell out of Memory Lane.”
* * *
—
Nancy hugs us goodbye at the door. “I wish you didn’t have to leave,” she says. “I’m certain Dwight will be home any minute now. He was just returning a book.” She stands on the porch, waving.
I watch her dwindle out of sight. “Nancy seemed so sad. Lonely.”
“Dwight’s a good man—great poet—but he has his demons. Marriage isn’t always bliss,” my father says.
* * *
—
Two days later, my father receives a panicked call from Joanne. Dwight Burke’s body has been pulled out of the Hudson River. He had been missing since Monday morning.
“He went to see his friend Carter Ashe,” Joanne tells my father. “They ended up having one too many bourbons. You know how he is. Mother didn’t want him driving, convinced him to stay the night. According to Carter, Daddy drove down to the river at sunrise. ‘To shake off the night before.’”
“No better cure for a hangover than a cold swim,” my father says when he tells me about the drowning. “But that river can be a mighty beast.”
4:30 P.M.
There is nothing more beautiful than Jonas wet from a swim. Black hair slapping at his neck, dripping and rough-cut. Barefoot, wearing nothing but old shorts, his glowing skin, watchful pale green eyes. He picks a leaf off a bush and carefully removes its spine, its tracery, lays the delicate silhouette on the palm of my hand. He crushes the torn-away green of the leaf and waves it under my nose.
“Mmm.” I breathe in its raw, minty smell. “Sassafras.”
“Did you know Native American tribes used it to cure acne?”
“Very romantic.” I laugh.
“Quick walk to the sea?”
* * *
—
The sun has poured a molten river onto the ocean. A cormorant plunges into liquid gold. Waves swell without cresting. Plovers peck their way around the sandbars in search of sea lice and razor clams. There are still a few late-afternoon stragglers. We sit in a hollow at the top of the dunes, hidden behind a screen of poverty grass. I am in love.
“There was a seal hauled up on the beach earlier,” Jonas says. “Finn and I walked down to see it. Huge gash in its blubber. Looked like a shark had tried to take a bite out of it.”
“Why do all those idiots at the beach still get excited when they spot a seal in the water? They’re everywhere now—they’re like the pigeons of the sea.”
“Seals are quite extraordinary. They can drink salt water and distill it into fresh. They separate out the salt in their urine. I wrote a paper about it in fifth grade. As I recall, I posited the idea that someone should figure out a way to make a saltwater distillery out of seal bladders.”
“What a peculiar child you were.”
Jonas trickles grains of sand through his fingers. “So, what did you and Peter do after you left the beach?”
“I don’t know. Nothing really.”
“When we arrived, he thanked us for hanging with the kids. Said it was nice for you two to have some ‘alone time.’”
“Jonas.”
“Sorry.” He looks ten years old. “I can’t help it.”
“You can.”
He threads a sharp blade of grass between his thumbs, strings it tight, blows through the hole, a low foghorn tone.
“Fine,” I say. “But you asked. We threw our wet towels in the back of the car, pulled off onto a dead end in the woods, and had sex. It was nice. It’s been a while.”
“You’re lying.”
“He’s my husband, Jonas.”
“Don’t.” He stares at the ground, hair falling across his face. I can’t see his eyes.
I sigh. “We went to Black Pond for a quick swim, and then I sat on the porch and read my back-issue guilt pile of New Yorkers while I waited for you. What took you so long? I was going crazy.”
Jonas looks up now and smiles. “God, I am so fucking in love with you.”
Far away, on the flat glassy sea, a fat seal head breaks the water’s surface. I watch it appear and disappear up the shoreline.
“I’m in love with you, too,” I say. “But I’m not sure it matters.”
1980. October, New York.
Orchestra has gone late. We are rehearsing for the middle school winter concert. I am second flute.
“Stands away, everyone,” Miss Moody, our music teacher, calls out as students begin filing toward the door. “Chorus is in this room first period.” She comes over to where I’m sitting, putting away the pieces of my flute. “I’d like you to work on that first movement over the weekend, Eleanor. And do those exercises I gave you last week in our lesson. You need to strengthen your embouchure if you are going to hit the high C. We wouldn’t want you to go sharp, would we?”
I like Miss Moody, but she can be so annoying. I pull on my down jacket, shove my flute in my book bag.
It’s only four thirty, but already it feels as if night is falling. I hate Daylight Savings. The late October wind bites through my c
lothes as I trudge home alone down Madison Avenue. At Eighty-eighth Street, I stop at the stationery store to get a 3 Musketeers bar. When I exit the store, a young guy is leaning against the wall of the building. He is tall, his face covered in acne scars, wearing a Varsity basketball jacket—St. Christopher’s, the Catholic high school in our neighborhood.
“Hey.” He smiles at me, so I smile back. “Nice tits,” he says as I walk past him.
“I’m wearing a parka, moron.” But I hunch my shoulders and walk away as fast as I can, down the darkening street. I’d run, but I know better than to look afraid. I’m waiting to cross at the light when I hear footsteps behind me. It’s him, and he has a twisted, creepy smile on his face. I look around for a grown-up to walk with, but there’s no one else on the street. He reaches into his pocket. He has a switchblade.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he hisses.
Cars are coming in both directions, but going into the traffic seems the safest option. A Checker cab barely misses me, and the driver rolls down his window to shout. But I keep going, running so hard that the cold air burns my lungs. At the bottom of the hill I make a sharp turn and run into the lobby of a doorman building.
“Can I help you, miss?”
I can’t catch my breath. “There’s a guy following me,” I gasp.
The doorman goes out onto the street, looks both ways. “No one out here,” he says.
I sit down on a radiator bench.
“Is there someone you’d like me to call?”
“No, thank you,” I say. Mum is sitting in on Leo’s sound check at the Village Gate. It’s Thursday, so Conrad will still be at wrestling practice. “I live around the corner.”
The doorman checks the street again and gives me the thumbs-up. “All clear, miss.”
I follow him out and look down the block toward Park Avenue. There’s a church on the corner. Its lights are on.
“I’ll be okay,” I say.
But the moment I hear the heavy doors closing behind me, I wish I had stayed put. I walk down the street checking every stairwell, walking close to the cars. The Christmas trees are already up on the center islands of Park Avenue, their fairy lights making a path down the middle of the avenue, all the way to Grand Central. In the spring, beds of tulips bloom there. They come back every year with the cherry blossoms. On our block, the tulips are bright red. When their petals begin to fall, they leave behind rows and rows of naked stalks crowned with small black clusters that look like eyelashes.
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