‘Helene looks as though she’s come to terms with something, as though she’s made some sort of decision,’ she observes.
‘My sister doesn’t make decisions,’ Susan replies. ‘She drifts into them. She drifted across Europe and then she met Greg and she drifted into marriage. He became a teacher and so she drifted into teaching. It’s worked for her. I’m the list maker, the organizer. The planner. And right now I’m not all that sure it’s worked for me.’ Her voice is heavy with a sadness that she herself does not understand.
‘She may have changed. Maybe she’s taken a page out of your book. And you could change. Maybe take a page out of her book. It happens,’ Nessa observes, but Susan is no longer listening. Her gaze is fixed on the tennis courts where Simon and Jeff, neither of them accomplished players, are indulging in a leisurely volley as Polly, her arms laden with newly laundered white tablecloths, pauses to watch them. Polly turns suddenly and, seeing Susan, she blushes deeply and hurries into the inn.
‘She’s just a kid,’ Nessa says. ‘A town kid with a sick mother and a depressed father striving toward a better life.’
‘Yes. I know,’ Susan replies. ‘I just hope it’s not my life she’s fantasizing about.’
Simon and Nessa carry their picnic basket out to the lawn late each afternoon but the group that joins them dwindles and varies. Daniel and Wendy occasionally join them but Andrea and Mark Templeton sit by themselves, all but concealed by the copper beech tree that dominates the far corner of the lawn. Their backs are toward her but Nessa is reasonably certain that the oversized soft leather handbag Andrea carries (she has several in different pastel shades and alternates them each day to match her outfit) contains a bottle of vodka and the small glasses Louise has reported missing from the kitchen. Andrea always pauses as she glides across the lawn to plant a light kiss on Wendy’s cheek. She is demonstrating that there is no aftermath of antipathy since their angry exchange. She is not a woman who can cope easily with confrontations.
The evenings pass quietly. The Scrabble and chess games resume seamlessly and the jigsaw puzzle inches its way to completion, Paul and Annette uttering small yelps of excitement as a complicated section is completed. Greg idly strums his guitar, the dart board is approached and abandoned, the small boys chase fireflies.
Jeremy, Tracy and Richie disappear, sometimes briefly, sometimes for hours. Nessa supposes that they are smoking down at the lake, maybe pot, maybe cigarettes, or perhaps having beers at the small village tavern. She is relieved that Paul is not with them, relieved that Simon seems unconcerned. It pleases her that Annette lightly touches Paul’s hand as she fumbles for one puzzle piece and then another.
On such an evening, at the end of the week, Louise Abbot joins her guests, her apron discarded, her hair twisted into a chignon that she has copied from Andrea Templeton. Room is made for her at the Scrabble table.
‘Evan loves Scrabble,’ she says as though mentioning the name of her husband will compensate for his frequent absences.
The other players, Nessa, Helene and Liane, nod.
‘I’m glad to have the night off,’ Louise says. ‘I was going to bake blueberry pies but I never got to the blueberry farm.’
‘That’s what we ought to do tomorrow,’ Nessa says. ‘We ought to go and pick blueberries for you, Louise. We’ll do it tomorrow.’
The others nod vigorously. It is indeed time to leave the inn, to indulge in a new adventure. Good for the children, something for the teenagers to do, good for all of them to feel the sun on their faces, the fruit plump beneath their fingers. Liane wonders what she will wear. She knows the dangers of blueberry fields. She does not want her new clothes to be ripped by brambles or stained with juice, but she smiles with practiced enthusiasm.
‘It should be fun,’ she says.
‘Are you in, Daniel? Wendy?’ Nessa calls across the room.
And Daniel, who remembers picking blueberries with his parents during the August vacations of his childhood, nods, and Wendy, who is in the market for new memories, raises her hand in agreement.
‘After breakfast then,’ Nessa decides, and she smiles broadly as she puts down a seven-letter word across a triple space and earns herself eighty-seven points. As she herself often says, she is not a competitive woman, but she does love to win.
It rains fiercely during the night but they waken the next morning to the brilliant sunlight that often follows nocturnal mountain storms. The lawn is bathed in radiance and dancing sun beams spangle the windows. Polly’s face is aglow after her walk to the inn and her bare arms flash golden as swiftly she places platters of pancakes and French toast on the tables. Susan thinks of a single sentence in her translation in which LeBec writes ‘le soleil rayonée le sensualisme’. She had translated it, hesitantly, to read, ‘the sun radiates sensuality’ and, looking at Polly, she recognizes the truth of LeBec’s observation.
‘I think I’ll give the translation a pass this morning and go to the blueberry farm with you,’ she says, touching Jeff’s arm lightly. She will not forego the radiance of this day, the warmth and excitement of sensual sunlight.
‘Great.’ He pours another cup of coffee and she adds the cream and one teaspoon of sugar to it, carefully leveling it in the breakfast habit of their early courtship and of the vanished leisurely mornings of the first years of their marriage. It is an assertion of a kind. Of such small gestures, the basketry of love is tightly woven. She wonders if those words are her own.
They gather on the driveway to decide on how to arrange the cars. The smaller boys clamor to go together in one car and they pile into Nessa’s messy van where they know no complaint will be registered if candy wrappers are scattered on the floor or if juice spills on the upholstery which is already stained beyond repair. Wendy and Daniel will travel on Daniel’s motorcycle. Wendy has succumbed at last to his assurances that it will be safe and has strapped on the helmet, absently plucking out the long blonde hairs that cling to the lining. Laura’s hairs, she realizes. Andrea Templeton approaches her just as Daniel revs the motor.
‘I thought we would go to the nursery today and select the plantings for Adam’s grave,’ she says.
‘Maybe in the afternoon,’ Wendy replies.
She has not forgotten that within days it will be the anniversary of Adam’s death. The tenth anniversary. After a decade, does the statute of limitations on grief expire? The thought shames her. In atonement she summons up a mental image of Adam as she first knew him, the Adam who had so tenderly dried her hair the night of their first meeting, who had recited poetry to her in the half light of dawn, the Adam who was Donny’s father.
She tightens her grip around Daniel’s waist and does not look back as they speed down the sun-ribbed road.
All the young people pile into Richie’s car, Annette’s long legs dangling out the window as she sprawls across Paul’s lap. Tracy leans forward and toys with the radio, searching for a station that plays jazz.
‘Not that. No classical. No news.’
They laugh as she spins the dial and Annette waves her long legs as Richie accelerates and the roadster hurtles out of the driveway. Paul Epstein’s hand rests on her head.
‘Dangerous,’ Susan Edwards murmurs. ‘No seat belts. Five of them in that tiny car.’
‘They’ll be all right,’ Helene assures her sister. ‘Greg and I did lot of stuff that was way more dangerous back in our glory days. Right, Greg?’
She is thinking of how they hitched through Greece, then drove a beat-up hulk of a car through Tuscany. It broke down just before Siena and they hiked into the village in the dead of night. Danger meant excitement, freedom of a kind, membership in the community of the young and the daring. Danger meant an escape from her memories of her mother, from the real domestic hazards of her childhood. It is not something that Susan understands. Susan, who was in search of a home, in search of family and stability, married Jeff straight out of college and spent the days of her young womanhood translating textbooks and keepi
ng house. Susan had not known the danger, nor had she harvested the memories. Helene, who envies her sister in so many things, pities her for that loss.
‘Right,’ Greg agrees. ‘Where did we bum a ride on an ox cart?’
‘Sicily. It must have been Sicily.’
‘I never had any glory days,’ Liane says wistfully.
She is pale on this golden morning and she has dressed with uncharacteristic carelessness, the brightly colored polished cotton shirts and the hip-hugging Capri pants abandoned in favor of jeans and a loose white shirt. Her hair, un-teased and un-lacquered, is caught up in a loose ponytail. Nessa, who notices such things, thinks that Liane looks both sad and frightened. She wonders if the deal Simon has been trying to broker for Michael with Mark Templeton has fallen through. Perhaps that is why he too has stayed behind, explaining that he had to be on hand for a conference call.
Liane follows Greg and Helene into the back seat of the Edwards’ car.
‘Michael’s not coming,’ she explains. ‘Mark wants to go over some data with him. It’s important. Really important. Some very big deal they’re working on.’
Her heart beats too rapidly. She fears to think of how desperately important it is, how their entire life lies in the balance. She herself has not yet assimilated that knowledge, so new and so terrifying.
She had told Michael about the planned berry-picking excursion the previous night.
‘I can’t go,’ he had said. ‘I have to go over some stuff with Mark Templeton and with Simon.’
Anger had gripped her and she crept into bed beside him, simmering with fury. As they listened to the rain dance its way across the copper eaves, the cumulated disappointments of recent days, of months and years, boiled over into a litany of complaints. She shot them at him like bullets.
Michael was spending too little time with her, too little time with Cary, she felt herself neglected and bored. This was not what he had promised her, not what she had signed on for. Her plaintive accusations spattered forth in rhythm with the falling drops.
He had turned to her, his face a death mask of sadness, his voice an angry hiss.
‘You don’t understand what’s at stake here, Liane. Do you think I enjoy working during vacation? But I have no choice. Understand this. I have a negative cash flow. We’ve been living on plastic for months. We’re surviving because I refinanced the house. We could lose everything. Everything. I need Mark Templeton. I need the capital he can pump in. And I need Simon Epstein who’s helping to persuade him that my software is a good investment – which it is if only I can get it off the ground. So stop complaining and let me do what I have to do, goddamn it! For once, think about me and not just yourself and what you want and what you need and what you don’t have. It was to give you everything you wanted that I went out on my own.’
‘But it was what you promised me.’ She murmured her defense as a single shaft of lightning streaked across the sky. ‘I thought you could do it. I thought you wanted to do it.’
But he turned away and lay rigid beside her as the rain intensified and the wind moaned in the darkness. She wept then although she did not know if her tears were for him or for herself or for their son, asleep in the alcove, who now and again laughed sweetly in his sleep. She wakened early and, although Michael still slept, she moved closer to him and brushed his eyelids with her lips, a new and unfamiliar sympathy dislodging contempt. But he did not waken.
Liane stares out of the car window during the brief drive to the berry orchard. She does not look at Helene and Greg, who sit very close to each other. They are trying to remember a song learned in Italy, and they laugh as Helene sings the first line and he hums the second. Susan wipes a scrap of egg from Jeff’s lip. Liane closes her eyes.
These small marital intimacies of touch and song deepen Liane’s feeling of aloneness on this sun-washed day. She is seared with jealousy and pretends not to hear when Helene asks her if she has ever picked blueberries before. She does not tell Helene that from earliest childhood she had picked the blueberries that grow wild along the coastal shore because her family could not afford to buy fruit. She shrinks from the memory of that poverty and trembles at the thought that she might sink into it yet again.
The cars from Mount Haven Inn pull into the parking lot of the blueberry orchard simultaneously. Richie’s brakes squeak and he blares his horn. The teenagers disentangle themselves and laughingly fumble for sandals and sneakers. The small boys argue shrilly about who will pick the most berries. Matt and Cary remember that the previous year it was Donny who triumphed, but they also remember that his mother had helped fill his sack.
‘It wasn’t fair. It was cheating,’ Cary says.
‘OK. I won’t let her help me this year.’
Donny is indifferent. He scurries away from his friends as Daniel’s motorcycle pulls up and his mother slides off. Her face is radiant, her dark hair cascades about her shoulders when she removes the helmet.
‘That was great,’ she says. ‘That was fun.’
She speaks with amazement, as though bewildered by the thought that fun has re-entered her life.
‘Was it exciting, Mom? Can I try it? Please? Please?’ Donny grips her hand, proud of his mother, exhilarated by her daring.
‘Maybe one day, honey.’ She leans down and kisses him, a mistake she realizes at once. She has, yet again, embarrassed him in front of his friends.
‘Don’t turn him into your companion,’ her therapist had warned her. ‘It’s a danger with single mothers of sons.’
She sighs. All the days and nights of her motherhood are fraught with danger.
‘Damn Adam.’
The thought, unbidden, shames her and Daniel, as though sensing the sudden shift of her mood, places a protective hand on her shoulder. She shakes it off impatiently and does not look up at him.
The owner of the orchard, a florid-faced, lank-haired woman, her hands stained blue, berry juice spattered across her oversized overalls and her long-sleeved army shirt, distributes large plastic sacks.
‘You’ve got acres and acres to choose from here,’ she says. ‘And it’s been a good season. You’re in luck. Fill as many sacks as you want. A dollar a sack. You can stay close or spread out. But someone go along with the kids.’
Richie breathes into his clear plastic sack and laughs as it inflates into a transparent oval balloon that he twirls about his head. Annette claps her hands in appreciation. Nessa wonders why her stepson’s smart-aleck playfulness annoys her and, with her usual honesty, recognizes that it is because of Annette’s applause. She wants Annette to admire Paul, to be vested in him, because she knows that he is already vested in her. She does not want this girl, this very nice girl who delights her son, to be bewitched by Richie, who drives a roadster and blows plastic bags into the shape of a huge condom.
She shrugs and volunteers to supervise the boys and Liane offers to join her.
The teenagers race toward a distant field, Tracy and Annette sprinting ahead with Paul, Richie and Jeremy doing stag leaps behind them. Their long golden limbs are dappled by flickering shadows. They disappear into the overgrown foliage, their laughter trailing behind them.
Susan and Jeff head toward a favorite patch, revisited year after year, and Helene and Greg trail after them while Daniel and Wendy make their way toward a distant, overgrown thicket, its deep green leafage pebbled with blue fruit.
They begin to pick slowly, the work evenly divided by tacit consent. The berries are plump, small, thin-skinned globules exploding with juice. They grow in thick clusters and fall easily from the branches into Wendy’s deft fingers. Daniel holds the bag open and she drops her harvest into it and slowly increases her pace, stripping one branch bare and moving on to the next. Fat bumblebees hover lazily over the laden bushes, their bodies swollen, their wings, delicate as cellophane, barely moving as they settle briefly, now in one patch, now in another. Their muted humming fills the air. The bees circle lazily and, with odd suddenness, take flight.
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Wendy pauses to watch them and absently nibbles at the berries in her hand. Daniel reaches into the sack and crams an entire handful into his mouth. Juice trickles down his chin and Wendy, her own lips stained blue, laughs and moves toward him, fumbling in her pocket for a tissue. She reaches out to wipe his chin and, yet again, he places his hand on her bare shoulder. The warmth of her skin causes his fingers to tingle. They stand motionless for a brief moment beneath the verdant canopy of the tall, entangled bushes and then he pulls her toward him and kisses her hard, hears her gasp and feels the softness of her mouth against his own. Her slender body, yielding and pliant within his embrace, unlike Laura’s dancer’s body, surprises him. He remembers the tautness of his wife’s trained muscles, the tight strength of her arms. Sadness pierces him. Gently, he releases Wendy. Startled, she steps away from him, her arms limp, as though she cannot think of where to place them.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ she replies. ‘A kiss. It was just a kiss. It was nice. It was good. It tasted like blueberries.’
They return to work, easily reclaiming their rhythm, berries falling softly upon berries, their eyes riveted to their work. His face is flushed. Hers is pale.
‘Too soon,’ she murmurs when the sack is full. ‘Not your fault. Not mine. It was just too soon.’
‘No. It’s because I’d forgotten.’ His own voice is hoarse with regret.
‘Forgotten what?’ Expertly she knots the bag and licks her fingers.
‘I’m not sure.’
He looks hard at her, at her fine-featured face and dark eyes, at a heart-shaped green leaf that is entwined in her long dark hair, and realizes that while it was Laura he had thought of as he held her close, it was tenderness and the gentleness of touch that he had forgotten. He has been for so long without them. He cannot explain that to Wendy because she is right. It is too soon. They are, both of them, too vulnerable. Wordlessly, he places his hand on her head, threads that stray leaf between his fingers, and together they emerge from the shadows of the grove into the dazzling sunlight that sweeps across the orchard.
Guests of August Page 14
