by Ann Patchett
It was easily 105 degrees inside the car. She started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, turned off the radio. She lay across the scorching green vinyl of the bench seat so that no one looking out the front window of the house could see her. She thought about the fact that if she were in the garage rather than the carport she’d be killing herself now.
Because California public schools ran slightly longer than Virginia Catholic schools, Beverly and Bert had had five days alone in the house between her children’s departure and his children’s arrival. One night after dinner they made love on the dining room carpet. It wasn’t comfortable. Beverly’s weight had steadily dropped since their move to Virginia, and the bony protrusions of her vertebrae and clavicles were so clearly displayed she could have found work in an anatomy class. Every thrust pushed her back a quarter inch, dragging her skin against the wool blend. But even with the rug burns it made them feel daring and passionate. It hadn’t been a mistake, Bert kept telling her as they lay on their backs afterwards, staring up at the ceiling. Beverly counted five places where the glass crystals on the chandelier were missing. She hadn’t noticed it before.
“Everything that’s happened in our lives up until now, everything we’ve done, it had to happen exactly the way it did so that we could be together.” Bert took her hand and squeezed it.
“You really believe that?” Beverly asked.
“We’re magic,” Bert said.
Later that night he rubbed Neosporin down the length of her spine. She slept on her stomach. That was their summer vacation.
Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The Cousinses did not prefer the company of Cousinses and the two Keatings could have done without each other entirely. The four girls were angry about being crowded together into a single room but they didn’t blame each other. The boys, who were always angry about everything, didn’t seem to care that they were in the company of so many girls. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.
The only one who was troubled by this fact was Franny, because Franny had always loved her mother. During the regular part of the year they sometimes took naps together in the afternoons after school, spooning so close they fell asleep and dreamed the same dreams. Franny would sit on the closed toilet lid in the morning and watch her mother put on makeup, and she would sit on the toilet lid again at night and talk to her mother while her mother soaked in the bath. Franny was secure in the knowledge that she was not only her mother’s favorite daughter, she was her mother’s favorite person. Except in the summer, when her mother looked at her as if she were nothing more than the fourth of six children. When her mother was sick of Albie, she announced that all children had to go outside, and “all children” included Franny. Ice cream had to be eaten outside. Watermelon—outside. Since when had she not been trusted to eat watermelon at the kitchen table? It was insulting, and not just to her. Maybe Albie couldn’t eat a dish of ice cream without dropping it on the floor but the rest of them were perfectly capable. They went outside all right. They went outside and slammed the door and took off down the street, loping across the hot pavement like a pack of feral dogs.
The four Cousins children didn’t blame Beverly for their miserable summers. They blamed their father, and would have said so to his face had he ever been around. Cal and Holly gave no indication that they thought Beverly’s behavior was inexcusable (and Jeanette never said anything anyway, and Albie, well, who knew about Albie), but Caroline and Franny were horrified. Their mother made everyone line up in the kitchen according to age and come to the stove with their plate instead of putting the food on the table in dishes as she did every other night of the year. In the summers they wandered out of the civilized world and into the early orphanage scenes of Oliver Twist.
It was a Thursday night in July when Bert called a family meeting in the living room and announced that in the morning they were going to Lake Anna. He told them he had taken the next day off from work and rented three rooms at the Pinecone Motel. On Sunday morning they would drive to Charlottesville to see his parents and then come home again. “It’s a vacation,” Bert said. “All arranged.”
The children blinked, vaguely stirred to think of a day that wasn’t going to be like all the other days, and Beverly blinked because Bert hadn’t mentioned any of this to her. The children could see Beverly trying to catch Bert’s eye but Bert’s eye could not be caught. A motel, a lake, meals in restaurants, a visit to Bert’s extremely unwelcoming parents who had horses and a pond and a fabulous black cook named Ernestine who had taught the girls how to make pies the summer before. If the children had been inclined to speak to the parents they might have said it sounded like fun, but they weren’t inclined, so they didn’t.
The next morning it was hot as a swamp. The birds stayed quiet in an effort to conserve their energy. Bert told the children to go and get in the car, though everyone knew it wasn’t as simple as that. First there would have to be an ugly fight over who had to sit with Albie and they all stood around in the driveway waiting for it. The front seat, which was restricted to parents, was never an option, even though Caroline and Franny rode there with their mother all the time in the regular parts of the year. That left the backseat, the way-back, and the way-way-back of the wagon. In the end, the children were always arranged in pairs by gender or age, which meant that either Cal or Jeanette got stuck with Albie, occasionally Franny, never Caroline or Holly. Albie would sing an impassioned version of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in which the numbers did not diminish sequentially—fifty-seven bottles, seventy-eight bottles, four, a hundred and four. He would talk about how he was going to be carsick and make convincing gagging noises that forced Bert to the shoulder of the interstate for no reason, although Jeanette inevitably threw up, never having said anything about it. At every exit sign Albie would ask if that was the exit they were supposed to take.
“Are we there yet?” he would say, then burst out laughing at the pleasure of it all. No one wanted to sit with Albie.
Just as they were starting to shove one another around the driveway, Bert came out carrying a canvas bag the size of a shoe box. Bert was a very light packer. “Cal,” he said. “You ride with your brother.”
“I rode with him last time,” Cal said. Whether or not this was true no one could say, and what constituted “last time” anyway? The last time in the car? The last time on a trip? They never took trips.
“So you’ll ride with him this time too.” Bert threw his bag in the back and swung the door shut.
Cal looked around. Albie was darting towards the girls, poking them lightly with his index finger and making them scream. All four of the girls blurred together in Cal’s mind: his own sisters, his stepsisters, it was hard to single out one of them to take the fall. Then Cal looked at Beverly, her purple striped T-shirt, her long yellow hair curled and brushed into stylish order, her sunglasses big as a movie star’s. “Make her,” he said to his father.
Bert looked at his oldest child and then his wife. “Make her what?”
“Make her ride with him. Make her sit in the way-back.”
Bert smacked Cal with his open hand. It made a sound but it was hardly a serious blow, it only glanced off the side of his head. Cal stumbled back to make it look worse than it was. He’d taken harder hits at school, and this one was worth it just to see what little color Beverly had drain out of her face. Cal could tell that for a split second she hadn’t known whose side Bert would be on, and she had seen herself riding all the way to Lake Anna in the backseat with Albie, and she had died. Bert said he was sick of all the horseshit. He told them to get in the car. And they did it, even Beverly, silently, and with grave bitterness.
On the road Bert kept the window down, his elbow p
ointing out towards the rolling hills, and said nothing. Three hours later when they got to the Arrowhead Diner he had everyone line up and count off, Cal being one, Caroline being two, Holly being three.
“We’re not the goddamn Trapp Family Singers,” Cal said under his breath.
Franny looked up at him with a mixture of fear and disbelief. He had taken the name of God in vain. That was a big one. “You can’t swear,” she said. Bert could swear, even though it was a bad idea, but children could never swear. She was sure of that. Even in the summer she was a Sacred Heart girl.
Cal, both the oldest and the tallest of all the children, put his right hand on the top of her head, and, curling his fingers down towards her ears, squeezed. It wasn’t as hard as he would have squeezed the head of one of his real sisters, but still, he maintained control.
Caroline, being the oldest of the girls, got to decide who would share beds at the Pinecone, and at dinner made the pronouncement that she would sleep with Holly. That meant Franny got Jeanette. Franny liked Jeanette. She liked Holly too as far as that was concerned, she just didn’t want to sleep with Caroline, who was not above trying to smother her with a pillow in the middle of the night. The boys got their own room, and each his own bed. At seven o’clock that night the parents began to fidget and yawn, and then announced that they were exhausted, it was bedtime, and there would be fun in the morning.
But what the children got in the morning was a note slipped under the door of the girls’ room. Have breakfast in the coffee shop. You can charge it. We’re sleeping late. Do not knock. It was their mother’s handwriting but the note was not signed Love or even Mommy. It wasn’t signed at all. One more document in the ever-growing mountain of evidence that they were on their own.
Every door in the long row of bright-blue doors at the Pinecone was closed and the drapes over every window were pulled together. The cars parked in front of the rooms were wet with dew, or maybe it had rained during the night. The girls stood outside and knocked on Cal’s door, the one to the right of theirs. Cal opened the door a crack. He kept the chain on and looked out at her with a single eye. “We’re going to breakfast,” Holly said. “Come or don’t come.”
Cal closed the door, took off the chain, and opened it again. Behind him they saw Albie sitting on his double bed watching cartoons, his feet rhythmically kicking the end of the mattress. Whenever any of the girls thought to complain that there were four of them in a room sharing two beds, they thought of Cal, sharing a room with Albie. Cal shared a room with Albie at home so maybe he was used to it but probably not.
“Let’s go,” Cal said.
Cal was built on his father’s model. He was a tan boy with tan hair, and in the summer both the boy and his hair took on an undertone of gold. Cal had blue eyes, his father’s eyes, while the other three had dark eyes like their mother. Albie may have looked a little bit like freckled Holly but Holly’s good sense and Albie’s lack of it scrubbed out any physical resemblance between them. All four of the children were thin but Jeanette was too thin to look like any of them. She was never described by her pretty face or by her hair, which was glossy and the color of dark honey. Jeanette was referenced only by her elbows and knees, which did, in fact, resemble doorknobs. When the six of them were together they looked more like a day camp than a family, random children dropped off on the same curb. There was very little evidence of their relation, even among those who were related by blood.
“They’ll sleep until noon,” Holly said, meaning the parents. In the diner she pushed her eggs around in circles with her fork.
“And when they do finally get up they’ll just tell us they have to take a nap,” Caroline said. It was true. The parents napped like febrile toddlers. All the children nodded their heads. Cal was next to the window in the booth and he turned away from the rest of them to stare at the road. Albie was pounding the bottom of a ketchup bottle with the flat of his palm until finally the ketchup poured out onto his pancakes.
“Jesus,” Cal said and snatched the bottle away. “Can’t you sit here without doing something disgusting?”
“Look,” Albie said, and held up the pancake, dripping ketchup, in front of his face.
Jeanette pinned her toast to her plate with two fingers and removed the crusts with a knife.
“I’m not just going to sit here all day waiting for them,” Caroline said.
“What else can we do?” Franny asked, because there wasn’t anything to do. See if the motel had any board games maybe? A deck of cards? It was still so early, just now seven o’clock, and the sun came through the window of the diner like an invitation delivered to their table on a silver tray. It would have been a good day to swim.
“We came here to go to the lake so we should go to the lake,” Caroline said, reading her sister’s mind, or half of it. She was wearing her swimsuit under her clothes. They all were. Caroline was a lot angrier than the rest of them. It was there in her voice all the time. Then again, it could have been that Cal was the angriest and his anger just manifested itself in different ways.
Jeanette lifted her eyes from her toast. “Let’s go,” she said. It was the first thing she had said since they left Arlington the day before and so that settled it. Why should they wait for the parents to wake up? When they did go out with the parents, the children were divided into two groups—the big kids: Cal, Caroline, and Holly; and the little kids—Jeanette, Franny, and Albie. The big kids were allowed to wander off, swim in deep water without life jackets, hike out past anyone’s view, and decide what they wanted for lunch. The little kids might as well have been tied to a tree and made to eat from a single dish. The little kids were never to be trusted. With no further discussion, the six of them decided it would be better to see this as an opportunity.
At the cash register they added a six-pack of Coke and twelve candy bars to their breakfast tab, enough to see them through to lunch if necessary.
“How far is it to the lake?” Holly asked the waitress who was ringing them up.
“Maybe two miles, a little less. You just get back on Route 98.”
“What if you walk?”
The waitress studied the children for a minute. So many of them looked to be exactly the same size. Franny and Jeanette were thirty-eight days apart in age. “Where’re your parents?”
“Getting dressed,” Caroline said in the voice of a bored child. “They want us all to walk together. They said it was going to be an adventure. We’re supposed to get directions.”
The other children beamed at her for lying so deftly. The waitress took a paper placemat off the stack and turned it over. “There’s a shortcut if you walk.” On one end of the placemat she drew a rectangle to represent the motel (which she labeled “P”) and on the other end a circle for the lake (“L”). The broken line she drew to connect the two was their ticket out.
In the parking lot, Cal tried all the doors to the locked station wagon. Franny asked him what he needed out of the car and he said, “Something. Mind your own business.” He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered in the window, trying to see whatever it was he wanted.
“I can break in,” Caroline said. “If it’s something you really need.”
“Liar,” Cal said, not bothering to look at her.
“I can,” she said and then she pointed at Jeanette. “Go get me a coat hanger out of the closet.”
It was true. Their father had shown them how that very summer. Their uncle Joe Mike had locked his keys in Aunt Bonnie’s car when they were all at their grandparents’ house that last weekend, and their father had unlocked the door with a coat hanger to save Joe Mike the twelve dollars it would have cost to call a locksmith. After that Fix had both girls practice because they were interested. He said it was a good thing to know.
“The mistake people make is that they think they’re supposed to pull up on something and you’re not, you push down,” he’d told them.
Caroline set about untwisting the wire hanger. That was the hardest
part.
“You’re wasting time,” Cal said.
“Whose time?” Holly said. “If you’re in such a hurry then go.” She was curious, and it was plain to all of them that Cal was curious too.
Albie walked in wide circles around the car, swinging his hips from side to side and doing the boom-boom thing.
“Pipe down,” Cal said to him. “If you wake Dad up he’ll take your head off.” That was when the rest of them remembered whose room the car was parked in front of and made a point to be quiet.
Caroline picked back the rubber seal at the bottom of the window with her pointer finger and stuck the coat hanger in while the other children pressed close to watch. Caroline was a little worried that locks might be different from one car to another. The station wagon was an Oldsmobile and Aunt Bonnie’s car was something else, a Dodge maybe. The tip of her tongue pushed up at the corner of her mouth while she guided the coat hanger blindly towards what her father called the sweet spot about ten inches down from the button lock. Then she felt it, the wire against the mechanism of the lock. She didn’t try to hook it though the temptation was there. It was just a little bump and she pushed straight down the way she’d been taught.
The lock popped up.
It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream. Caroline pulled the coat hanger out and opened the door like it was some sort of natural act. Even Albie put his arms around her waist. “You broke the car!” he said, his loud whisper making him sound like a movie gangster.
“That’s right,” she said and gave him the hanger as the morning’s souvenir. Albie immediately went to the car next to theirs and began jamming the hanger down against the window. Oh, what Caroline wouldn’t have given to call her father from the motel phone! She wanted him to know what a good job she’d done.
Cal took the coat hanger from his brother and studied it in light of this new potential. “You can teach me how to do this?” he said, either to Caroline or the coat hanger.
