"It's not what it was fifteen years ago," she said.
"It looks mighty fine to me." She had the sense that he was making a leap from her serve to . . . to her.
"Trust me: It isn't what it once was. Nothing is."
"Can I join you? I was looking for a game."
She gazed at the nearly empty basket at her feet. She'd planned on heading back to the pool soon, and diving into the water and splashing around with her daughter and her niece. Moreover, if this young man was a lifeguard, then the old guard on the courts to her left--the conservative codgers who disapproved of her grunts--would be miffed that she was playing tennis with him on a Saturday morning. He was, in their opinion . . . the help.
That, of course, was reason enough to play with him in her mind. Not unlike her own daughter, she took great satisfaction from the torments she inflicted on the older generation. Besides, he was awfully cute.
"You don't honestly think you can keep up with me, do you?" she asked, raising a single eyebrow.
He smiled. "I think I can try."
There didn't seem to be anybody else waiting, and so she nodded. "Okay. A couple games," she agreed. "What's your name?"
"Gary. Gary Winslow. My grandfather is--"
"Your grandfather is Kelsey Winslow, of course," she said, and she understood instantly why this lifeguard was so comfortable wandering around the courts right now looking for a game. Gary was working here for the summer, yes, but he was also a member. His parents had died in the attack on the World Trade Center, when the two of them had had the misfortune of being on one of the early-morning planes out of Boston that were plunged into the towers like missiles. Gary's father was an anesthesiologist and he was on his way to a symposium in San Francisco. Gary's mother was accompanying him for no other reason than the fact that the conference was in northern California and she'd never been there. Ever since then Gary and his sister (whose name, at the moment, escaped Catherine) had been raised by Kelsey and Irene Winslow.
"And you're Nan Seton's daughter, right?" he said, vaguely mimicking the sudden recognition that had marked her own voice. "Charlotte McCullough's mom?"
"I am."
"Charlotte's a terrific kid. Wants to be nineteen, but she's a sweet girl. Good little swimmer, too. I keep a close eye on her, of course--on both her and her cousin. But I can assure you: She's a real water rat."
Catherine found herself nodding, and two unattractive thoughts simultaneously filled her head: The first was incredulity that anyone would ever refer to Charlotte McCullough as "a sweet girl"; the second was the realization that before she had understood that Gary was a Winslow--no, before she had understood that he was that orphan Winslow--she had seen him only as a cheeky young lifeguard with very nice arms, more hair than her husband, and an apparent interest in her despite the fact she was the mother of one of the girls he was watching that summer. He was, she guessed, not quite half her age. She was acting like Mrs. Robinson, for God's sake! Usually the men with whom she flirted at least had finished college.
Still, he had been the one to approach her, hadn't he? What the hell?
A sweet girl.
That orphan.
Mrs. Robinson.
Quickly she grabbed a ball, hurled it into the air, and then slammed it as hard as she could into the far court. The ball passed so close to the white ridge along the crest of the net that the plastic fluttered just the tiniest bit, and in her head she heard the echo of her grunt: Unnhh!
"Let's go," she said to Gary, and the young man smiled and jogged to the other side of the court.
YOU CAN'T SHOOT a buck out of season, and you can't shoot a doe ever. Not in Vermont, not here.
That was what John had said to Sara in the small hours of the night--no more than eight or nine hours ago, now--after he had changed Patrick's small diaper and she was nursing the baby back to sleep. It had come up because their bedroom window was open, and once Patrick had settled down they could listen to the wind in the lupine and John thought he might have heard animals rustling just outside the house. In the garden, perhaps. He wasn't exactly talking to himself as he stood before the screen, but she knew that he didn't expect an answer, either.
Still, with her son lolling against her breast she had felt compelled to remind him that she couldn't imagine him shooting a deer over Spencer's kohlrabi or green beans, anyway.
No, he'd said. Of course not.
She sat now in the cool shade in the grass near the swimming pool with Patrick in his baby seat beside her and wondered why her husband would even be thinking of such things in the middle of the night. She watched the two girls dive, and it made her forget the deer and the garden for a moment. She was impressed with their grace and their courage. How Charlotte had learned to stand on the board with her back to the water, throw her hips high into the air, curl her body back toward the fiberglass, and then dive into the water--the rear of her skull so close to the board that Sara flinched the first time her niece demonstrated an inward--was beyond her. The fact that her own daughter, still two years younger than Charlotte, had learned to do a somersault over the past two weeks was equally as amazing. She knew they had been taught by the young woman who was the lifeguard this morning, a plump girl between her junior and senior years at the high school in Littleton. She never expected overweight teens--boys as well as girls--to be sufficiently comfortable with their bodies to thrive in any activity that involved limited amounts of clothing. This girl, however, was an apparent exception. She seemed to wear a towel around her waist like a skirt when she wasn't actually in the water, but otherwise she seemed completely at ease with the bulk she had wedged into her spandex. And she dove, Sara thought, like the small kestrels and falcons she'd seen darting through the air from the cliffs off Snake Mountain.
She politely clapped when Willow showed her a forward dive in the pike position. Her baby's eyes followed her hands and then he cooed.
"Yes," she murmured to him, leaning over to press her nose against his, "someday I will clap for you, too. Yes, I will."
Her daughter emerged from the water and raced across the grass to her, wrapping herself quickly in a towel. "At the bonfire tonight," Willow began, her sentence choppy because she was bouncing on one foot with her head angled to the side, "Charlotte said I can borrow her eye shadow. May I?"
"The stuff she was wearing last night at dinner?"
"Uh-huh."
"Why would you want to? It's purple, isn't it?"
"No. It's lavender."
"Oh."
"So it's okay?"
"I don't know, honey."
"Is it that you think ten is too young or you think I shouldn't wear eye shadow to a bonfire?" She had stopped hopping, but her teeth were chattering now.
"It's probably a little of both," she answered, and then said--her change of mood so abrupt that Patrick looked at her and clucked--"Oh, of course it's fine. Of course you may."
Willow smiled and then made Sara's morning more perfect than she had supposed it could be: The girl leaned over and kissed her warmly on her cheek, despite the nearby presence of Cousin Charlotte and the teenage lifeguard who had taught them to dive.
CATHERINE PADDED ACROSS the grass toward her sister-in-law and her nephew like a cat. Not a timid house cat: a feral cat, a mouser, the sort of strong and lithe feline that kills for a living. Her tennis sneakers barely touched the ground as she walked, and though she was sweating--it had taken her more effort to dispose of young Gary Winslow than she had expected--she wasn't tired and she moved with an undulant allure.
"That's Willow's mom, right?" Gary said to her as they approached Sara.
"Yes, indeed."
"A shrink?"
"Therapist," she answered, and as she said the word she wondered what her sister-in-law the therapist would think when she turned around and saw her striding across the grass with this young buck of a teenager. The truth was that Gary was simply going to introduce himself to the woman who was Willow's mom and then change in
to a swimsuit for his shift at the pool (and, suddenly, she thought of the swimsuit she had with her in her canvas bag and feared that it would seem matronly to this . . . boy). That was the only reason he was coming this way with her, after all, it wasn't really like the two of them were . . . together. But Catherine wondered if someone less perceptive than Sara might presume there was something vaguely untoward about her spending time with a strange teenager, the two of them glistening with sweat.
Sara looked up from the baby at her side and held her hand flat over her wild eyebrows like a visor. And the woman did indeed have big eyebrows. Sara was attractive, but with her eyebrows in need of attention, her coffee-colored hair the length of a teenager's--hair that was growing now the first telltale filaments of white, a few strands sprinkled in amid the brown just above her ears--and those eyeglasses even more dated than the ones worn by her own brother, John, she looked a tad too earthy for Catherine. Especially today in those sandals with clunky straps and those shorts the color of army fatigues.
Catherine remembered when John had first brought Sara to Manhattan to meet their mother and her and Spencer. John had discovered her while skiing in Vermont--within weeks, actually, of her and Spencer's own wedding--and unlike almost everyone else in the lodge that afternoon she was actually from the Green Mountains. Had grown up in a town northeast of Burlington. Her father taught at the University of Vermont, in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and he was one of the country's leading experts on a bug with the appalling-sounding name of the pear thrip. Being an expert on the pear thrip mattered in Vermont, because pear thrips liked to eat maple tree leaves. Sara's mother was the secretary at the village's elementary school, but she had recently retired. In any case, when Sara first saw the courtyard and the columns in Nan Seton's Manhattan apartment building, the cobblestone circle into which the town cars and taxis would travel while awaiting the privileged who lived in the great monolith of a structure, the doormen--there was not a single doorman, not here; there was instead a cadre of wizened old men and enthusiastic young ones scattered throughout the courtyard and standing vigil inside the elevators, some in blue uniforms and some in gray, all of whom had thick, lyric Irish accents--and then the endless sprawl that was the apartment itself, she seemed ill at ease. She had been quiet when she was getting the tour, and when she finally said something more than a monosyllabic murmur of appreciation, she had shaken her head and announced in a voice--playful, yes, but the awe, it was clear, was real, too--"Imagine. And to think I'd thought that everybody in New York City (at least everybody I'd ever meet) lived in those teeny-tiny studios where you slept on a convertible couch by the kitchen." Catherine remembered that her mother had been charming: She laughed and with a self-deprecating shrug explained to John's girlfriend that she and her husband had bought the apartment in the mid-1970s, when Manhattan real estate was worth a little less than property along the Love Canal. Nevertheless, Catherine thought that while there had been wonderment in Sara's reaction, there had also been a slight whiff of disapproval--as if Sara saw something decadent in the plates with the gold leaf in the breakfront or in the notion that although there wasn't a live-in maid, there really were two small bedrooms in the back of the apartment near the kitchen that were referred to as the maids' rooms. Catherine recalled experiencing an unpleasant quiver of guilt, and suddenly the Japanese screens and the Italian floor tile seemed ostentatious. Showy. Dissolute.
Yet Sara never seemed to manifest any particular bias toward either the proletariat or the rustic sugar makers, loggers, or beleaguered dairy farmers in her own corner of the country, and so over time Catherine decided that she had read more into Sara's reaction than was there. Still, Sara's upcountry lack of refinement had made an impression on Catherine, and though Sara had since earned a series of postgraduate degrees and then joined a large and thriving counseling practice, in some ways Catherine still viewed the woman--even though she and Sara were in fact the same age--as a younger sister who would always need a bit of her guidance.
Behind Sara, Catherine saw their two girls sitting on towels on the cement on the side of the pool. Her daughter was wearing a tank suit today, because--bless her own mother's heart--yesterday Nan had accidentally left the two strips of black that Charlotte had chosen as her summer bathing suit in the trunk of the car overnight, and when they finally found them this morning they had still been damp and they smelled like a tire iron. Even her daughter had had the common sense to see that she couldn't wear the string thing today, and she had donned her green and yellow Speedo without a fuss.
"Sara, this is Gary Winslow," she said, and quickly Gary squatted like a baseball catcher so that he was eye level with her sister-in-law. She hadn't expected this sort of impulsive graciousness on the lad's part, and she was impressed. "Gary is a lifeguard," she added. "His grandparents are Kelsey and Irene Winslow."
"It's nice to meet you," Sara said.
"I've had a wonderful time watching over your daughter this month. She's terrific," he told her, and Catherine felt a twinge of jealousy, a small spasm of resentment. This was awfully similar to what he had said to her about her own daughter when he'd introduced himself at the tennis court not forty-five minutes ago.
"She's having a nice summer," Sara said. "Thank you."
"And this must be her brother. Patrick, right?"
"Uh-huh."
He smiled at the infant, and then with a teenage boy's complete unease around babies--a discomfort that actually bordered on fear--he quickly turned back to Sara. Patrick reached out a hand toward him, batting at the air, and he might have cried out for this new person to pay him the attention he was accustomed to receiving, but he seemed to like the swishing feel the air made on his skin when he sliced his arm like a sword. "Has Willow showed you how well she can dive?" Gary asked.
"She has. It was one of the first things she did when we got to the club yesterday. She and Charlotte have been at it again most of this morning. They only stopped a couple of minutes ago."
"Gwen is teaching them. I can't dive to save my life, but Gwen is awesome. She's got the girls doing somersaults and inwards. Amazing."
"I saw."
"Mrs. McCullough just destroyed me on the tennis court. You play?" he asked.
Catherine found herself looking away, slightly relieved that he had called her Mrs. McCullough in front of her sister-in-law. At the tennis court, when they were changing sides after their fifth game, he had referred to her as Mrs. McCullough with such obsequiousness that she had told him he could call her Catherine. And, for the rest of the match, he had. Now, however, she was glad that he understood instinctively that around Sara a certain deference was in order.
So long, of course, as he didn't overdo it.
"I only play when I'm here," Sara replied, and she made it sound as if she played under duress. As if someone--a Seton, a McCullough--put a gun to her head.
"We just had an awesome game--me and Mrs. McCullough."
Catherine rolled her eyes for Sara's benefit. Now he was overdoing it: One "Mrs. McCullough" was appropriate; two, especially in such close proximity, made her sound geriatric.
"Oh, so that's what you were doing," Sara said, as if she hadn't known. As if she thought the tennis rackets they were holding were mere props. She was smiling when she said it so Catherine would know she was kidding.
"Yup," Gary said, and then his eyes trailed down Sara's legs to her ankle. "I like your tattoo."
"Ah, yes. I got that years ago."
"It's pretty."
"Thank you."
Catherine understood why men found tattoos on a woman erotic: It suggested she enjoyed forbidden things, was excited by taboos. It meant that she thought about her body as an object of ornamentation (or that she simply thought about her body at all). Still, Catherine didn't see how a wraparound tattoo of a little ivy could compensate for such dowdy shorts.
She was about to say something now to pull Gary's eyes away from her sister-in-law's legs, and her
mind was trying to finalize the thought: perhaps note that Sara was married to her older brother. She didn't have to open her mouth to divert the young man's attention, however, because in the sky in the distance they all heard a small engine, and they looked up at once and saw an ultralight plane--a hang glider with an engine, really--moving in slow motion against the hulking silhouette of Mount Lafayette. Gary stood so he could see it better, and even the pair of girls by the pool left their towels on the cement and ran over so they, too, could watch the strange, birdlike machine motor high above them in the crisp, cloudless air.
FROM THE PARKING LOT of the garden nursery Spencer could also hear the steady rumble of the ultralight, but he had no interest in the craft. He stood before the minivan for barely an additional second before climbing inside and slamming the door. Slamming it so hard the four thousand pounds of rented metal actually rocked back and forth on the wide radial tires. He had bought nothing, and he was frustrated. No urines, no pepper sprays, no magic deterrent that would keep the deer at a distance. He was going to drive now to the club with absolutely nothing to show for his visit to the garden center--or, for that matter, for the hour and a half he had spent surfing the Web that morning, enduring the nightmarishly sluggish download of each image onto his laptop computer's screen.
Before You Know Kindness Page 10
