by Nora Carroll
CHAPTER SIX
JESS, AGE THIRTY-THREE
“Of course, we can’t do anything ethnic . . . ” Russ was saying. He was hunched up in a wicker settee in the living room, knees jutting out, poring over the Fine Dining section of the Northwest Michigan Guide. “You can’t do anything ethnic between Yonkers and Oakland.”
“Oakland, Michigan?”
“Oakland, California. You know. Gertrude Stein. ‘There isn’t any there there’?” Russ flipped the pages of the newsprint throwaway impatiently. “But at least there they have decent ethnic food.”
Russ was something of a food snob—something that Jess knew she should appreciate more. He took her to excellent restaurants, and made gourmet meals for her. But her own taste had always run to simple stuff, something that Russ didn’t really understand.
“I know a place that makes good burgers,” Jess said. “Of course, who knows if it’s even there anymore.”
“Let’s do it,” Russ said. He slipped his arm around her as they made their way toward the car. She shrugged it off, and then stole a glance at him, but Russ wasn’t the sensitive sort, and he didn’t seem to notice that she was pushing him away. Maybe that was one of the reasons that she’d stuck with him, and that everyone assumed they were getting serious—because when she pushed, he stayed around anyway.
They circled downtown three times, looking at all the restaurants lining Main Street: whitefish houses, soup restaurants, and ice cream and popcorn shops.
“I’m so disoriented,” she said. “I would have thought I could find this place blindfolded . . . ”
They were about to give up, when Russ turned one more corner and she spotted the old neon sign with half the tubes burned out.
TH D CKSI ER
The Docksider
Inside, same scarred-up tables, same jukeboxes on the tables with old seventies tunes you could flip through while waiting to order. The Wequetona kids used to come here a lot, probably still did as far as Jess knew. They would ride their motorboats into town late in the evening and dock at the city marina.
People were smoking at the bar. The waitress showed them to a darkened booth in the corner and Russ ordered two beers. Jess looked down at the battered table and remembered nights from the old days, coming in bone chilled and windblown from the boat ride across the lake, when the scent of beer and cigarettes, boy-sweat on crew-neck Shetland sweaters, and the jukebox playing “Midnight at the Oasis” made her feel all buzzy inside. At age seventeen, she used to light up a cigarette and blow smoke rings at the ceiling. Now, she sat fingering the initials of the unknown lovers carved into the battered tabletop.
Russ was talking—telling Jess everything he’d read in a local guidebook: about the lumbering business at the turn of the century, about Ernest Hemingway’s descriptions of Indians in the Indian camps. She could tell he didn’t know she wasn’t really listening. She rubbed the beads of condensation that had gathered on the outside of her beer glass, looking, without really meaning to, over Russ’s shoulder, past the shiny bar top, to the door.
Jess had watched someone walk out that door once, his back to her, leaving her behind. Now, it seemed as if only minutes had passed since that night, and that soon the door would swing open again. Jess reached down and fished around in the bottom of her purse. There, in the zippered lining, she felt a forgotten cigarette, bent and shabby like an old tampon, and the familiar bulge of her lighter. She pulled them out and lit up, inhaling deeply on the first breath.
“I thought you quit!” Russ said.
“I did,” Jess said, forming her mouth into an O.
Just then, the bar door swung open, revealing a pretty woman whose shiny chestnut hair was pulled away from her face, and behind her a taller man with dark, wavy hair, worn longish. He was wearing a plaid polar-fleece shirt jacket, and, strapped to his chest in a baby carrier, there was a baby about six months old. Startled, Jess stared past Russ toward the doorway, which now framed the couple, the man with his arms looped loosely around the baby. His knees were slightly bent and his hair framed his face. His stance was one of particular grace—at once athletic and nurturing of his baby child.
“Oh, not here,” Jess heard the woman say. “Look, people are smoking.”
Jess felt herself straining, almost rising from her seat. Was it . . . ? Could it be him?
“Yeah, let’s try the Villager,” the man replied in an unfamiliar voice. As he turned to follow his wife out the door, the streetlight illuminated his face, and Jess saw the face of a stranger. She sank back down in her seat.
“Are you okay?” Russ asked. “You look kind of pale . . . ”
“It’s the nicotine,” Jess said. “I’m not used to it anymore.”
Jess picked up her glass and took a long swig of beer, letting the cold liquid sear her throat. Heat was rising along her cheekbones.
Russ reached out and put his hand over hers—even Russ, obtuse Russ, had picked up on her agitated state, on the awkward bulkiness of her shapeless desire.
He smoothed a lock of hair from her cheek and sat silently, looking at her face. She felt like telling him everything—just getting it off her chest.
“Russ . . . ” She studied his face, wondering if he would actually listen if she opened up and told him what was really on her mind.
But Russ liked to fill silences with the sound of his own voice. “Hey, we’ve got to make sure we get some blueberry jam. It’s a regional specialty . . . made with berries gathered by hand . . . ” Russ wasn’t a good listener—but wasn’t that one of the things she liked about him? Unlike other men she had dated, Russ wasn’t that interested in her past—not interested enough to want to pry.
By the time they got back into the rental car, Jess had whittled her desire down into a more manageable lump; it started somewhere underneath her collarbone and sat in the pit of her stomach, leaden but contained. She was not like her mother. She knew how to keep her passions simmering well below the surface.
Ardor unleashed was something she knew all about from Margaret. “Look what the cat drug home,” Margaret liked to say to Jess over breakfast. Jess would look up from her breakfast and see a bland and rather ordinary-looking fellow. Jess imagined her mother literally snatching these men unsuspecting off the streets, where they would find themselves not much later tangled and moaning in the sheets of Margaret’s bed. Margaret always paraded around the apartment stark naked, her poofy breasts bobbling, sometimes the fishy smell of sex still upon her. Early on, Jess thought she understood sex pretty well: it was actually quite common, but people pretended not to notice; it had a tendency to be noisy and to stink. The part Jess never got was where all the painful leave-taking came from—every love to Margaret, no matter how unpromising at the start, ended inevitably in fountains of tears and frantic phone calls from train stations. That was how Jess gained her early impressions of love.
During the ride back to the cottage, Jess had the window rolled all the way down so that the sound of the rushing wind made conversation nearly impossible. Russ tried shouting to her a little bit, but she kept saying, “What, I can’t hear you?” and finally he fell silent.
Toni Miller Barnes came highly recommended. She was a Miller, of the Miller cottage, a Wequetona girl who had married badly and gone local. Still, she had a small trust and enough affectation to make it in the business of catering to cottagers, a little interior decorating, a little real estate, and a sure eye for teaching new money how to look like old.
“Chippewa sweetgrass baskets,” Ms. Barnes was saying. Jess and Russ had spent the morning combing the cottage for anything that looked Indian, taking everything down and lining it up on any available tabletop in the living room. Actually, Jess did most of the work. Russ had brought an astonishing variety of books in his overnight bag. The Navajo Rug, The Ojibwa of Northwest Michigan, The Appraisers Guide to Native American Handicrafts and Antiques. He
spent most of the morning lying on the wicker settee in the living room, reading aloud to Jess from the books while she moved systematically from room to room, picking up objects that seemed to have possible value.
Jess had been washing dishes at the kitchen sink, looking out the back window, when Toni Barnes pulled up behind the cottage in her navy Volvo station wagon and marched toward the back door of Journey’s End. Jess dried her hands on the clean waffle-weave dish towel and stepped forward to open the back door.
“Jess!” Toni cried out. “After all this time! You look exactly the same. Exactly!”
Jess poured lemonade into tall blue-glass tumblers and led Toni through the cottage. Toni was chattering brightly as they walked through the shadowy interior and out onto the sunny front porch.
“I’m so delighted that you called me, Jess. Of course you know that Miss Mamie was something of a landmark here at Wequetona. Everyone in the Club has been wringing their hands worrying about the cottage’s sale. Everyone wants Journey’s End to stay with one of our families.”
Russ got up from the hammock and walked over to where Jess and Toni were standing. Slipping his arm around Jess, he said, “Ms. Carpenter wants to get the best possible price, and it should be worth quite a bit more as soon as we finish the renovations and do the photo shoot for a national magazine. Nothing else interests us at all.”
Jess was surprised, but not ungrateful for Russ’s action. She was perfectly capable of dealing with her own transactions, but she really couldn’t stand Toni Barnes, had never liked her. It was only bad luck that they were dealing with her at all. When she had called the RE/MAX office, the receptionist had said, “Wequetona Club—oh, that would be Toni Barnes.” Jess didn’t at first realize it was Toni Miller Barnes. After they had spoken by phone and the connection had been made, it felt like too much trouble to look for anyone else.
“I thought the Club had dropped all the ridiculous membership regulations,” Jess said.
“Well, there was some awkward legal story, someone threatening a lawsuit or some such. The board went through an emergency process, and the regulations were dropped.” Toni leaned forward and lowered her voice slightly. “Everybody seemed to think that doing things informally, within the Club, would be a better way to go. Inside sales, word of mouth, that kind of thing.”
Jess mainly wanted to sell the place soon and get back to New York. With Mamie gone, she found it unbearably sepulchral: a tomb for summer memories, a repository for long-forgotten souvenirs. But she didn’t want to be hoodwinked into selling the cottage for a song either. As a research librarian in the French manuscript collection, in New York, her small salary didn’t go very far—she was still paying off student loans, and her mother was so profligate that she called occasionally, rasping into the phone, “I’m broke and in Bangkok, can you wire me some money, please?” as though Jess were the Bank of New York, and not a poor librarian who spent her time arranging and stacking old manuscripts.
“I wonder if Jeb and Allison Cartwright are looking to buy,” Toni went on, acting as though she hadn’t heard anything Russ had just said. “Lovely couple. Jeb’s in securities.”
“If there is someone who is willing to come in with a good offer and accept the renovations sight unseen . . . we’d be willing to talk to them. We need to settle this as soon as possible and get back to New York.”
Jess was intrigued to see Russ, obviously so much in his element, dealing with the real-estate agent. He had taken on a vaguely proprietary air that she had never noticed before. She was exhausted and felt the beginnings of a migraine coming on. Russ had his arm around her and he kept saying “we.” It was such a relief not to have to deal with Toni Barnes. After a while, Jess picked up one of Russ’s magazines and went out on the porch. She let Russ do all the talking.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JESS, AGE SEVENTEEN
“The Millers are here,” Mamie said, not looking up from her mending. Her pale-blue glasses were perched on her nose. She was sitting on the porch swing, rocking slightly as she sat. “The David Millers.”
“Are they?” Jess said without much interest. This was a summer ritual, Mamie telling her the comings and goings of the cottagers. Few stayed all summer as they did. Most came for two or three weeks at a time and then left, replaced by another batch of cottagers, each group barely distinguishable from the last. “I thought the Sam Millers were still here,” Jess said, knowing as she said it that she had no idea who was in the Miller cottage.
“Left on Friday,” Mamie said.
Jess pulled the faded floral bolster under her head and flopped over in the hammock. She was starting to hate summer, even to miss her crazy mother with her oddball journalist friends. Before this, she had always loved Wequetona—the easy summer alliances, fast friendships that formed and faded just like summer tans, soon forgotten but leaving behind a reminder of the season’s warmth. But this summer was different. She kept running into people’s mothers who peppered her with news. Oh, Kristen misses seeing you. She stayed home to work this summer. David’s not coming up this year. Summer school. Jess was picking at the strings of the hammock where it was starting to fray. Staring out at the lake, feeling drowsy from boredom.
“The Miller girl. Isn’t she a friend of yours?” Mamie asked.
Jess rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. The Miller girl? There were five sons in the Miller family, all of whom shared the cottage. They had some complicated time-share system. Besides, they all kind of looked alike—angular, bucktoothed, and blond. Nobody could ever keep the Miller family straight.
“Do you think it’s Toni Miller?” Jess felt a little wave of dismay. They were around the same age, and people always expected them to be friends. They often ended up hanging around together, but they had never been close.
“Is that David Miller’s daughter? The pretty blond one?” Mamie said. “Yes, I think that’s the one.”
It was 5:30. Jess knew because her grandmother had gone into her dressing room to change for dinner. Mamie still dressed for dinner every night, even though now it was just the two of them sitting down to simple meals at the kitchen table in the add-on kitchen in the back. She never said anything to Jess, didn’t suggest that she change out of her jeans. The clubhouse had been closed for—oh, it must have been almost ten years, but Jess knew that Mamie still imagined that she heard the clubhouse bell, precisely at six, and could stroll down the walk like they used to. They gathered around the Tretheway table, in the drafty old wooden clubhouse with the linen-covered tables and worn wooden floors. The Club still held Vespers there on Sunday evenings; some of the older folk still went, including Mamie, of course. But for years it had been Mamie and Jess alone at the dinner table, Mamie dressed, with fresh makeup. Every night, they unfolded a fresh linen tablecloth and spread it out over the table, even though neither of them cooked much: they ate frozen dinners or canned chicken noodle soup.
“We didn’t even have a kitchen until after the war,” Mamie said to Jess more than once. “Most of the Indians were gone by then, and we couldn’t find staff for breakfast. I had it added on just for breakfast, you know. Never did I imagine . . . ” She spread her linen napkin in her lap, folding her hands on the table to say grace. “That we would dine here, Jess. Lord knows I never intended that.”
“Don’t you think you should stop by to see the Miller girl? Maybe you girls could spend some time together. Have a little fun.” Mamie was spooning cream of mushroom soup into her mouth, pausing between each mouthful to carefully dab at her lipsticked mouth with her napkin.
“Um, yeah, I guess so.”
“Don’t say yeah, Jess. Say yes, ma’am.”
“Yes, ma’am. I guess so.”
At a quarter to six the next evening, there was a knock on the cottage door. Toni Miller was standing on the porch, wearing Levi’s and a red stretch tube top, smelling strongly of Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil. To
ni threw her arms around Jess, who could feel the slick sheen of tanning oil on Toni’s bare skin. It was a relief to see someone her own age, even if it was Toni Miller.
“A bunch of us are going to picnic on Hemingway Point tonight. We’re going in Phelps’s boat. You wanna come?”
“Phelps is here?”
“Got in last night.”
Jess hadn’t seen Phelps around for several summers. He was a couple of years older, already a student at Yale. She remembered him well though. He had always been a leader at Wequetona, team captain for the relays, winner of the sailing cup, a little too arrogant for her taste. Besides, his mother, Mrs. Whitmire, had always struck her as kind of judgmental. How’s that mother of yours? she used to say. Even as a small child, Jess had understood that Mrs. Whitmire was not asking because she wanted to know the answer.
“So are you coming?” Toni asked.
“Of course.”
“We’re meeting at the dock at eight.”
After Toni had left, Mamie emerged from her bedroom, dressed for dinner in a blue ultrasuede suit. Her feet were shod in slingbacks of precisely the same shade of blue, and there was a small sapphire nestled at her neckline.
“Who was that, dear?”
“Toni Miller. She invited me to go to a picnic on Hemingway Point.”
Her grandmother paled slightly.
“At night? Hemingway Point?”
“Toni said that Phelps is going to take us, in his boat.”
“Is that Phelps Whitmire? That good-looking Whitmire boy?” Jess could hear that plummy tone in her grandmother’s voice, the one she saved for certain Wequetona people.
