The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  Instead of relief, Eliot feels an unexpected pang of disappointment. It isn’t that he needs Caroline the way she thinks he does. He can cook eggs and toast and cream of wheat, and microwave the dinners his father buys in bulk at Costco. He does his homework. He keeps his room neat. He never sits for hours in front of the TV. But still. There is something he likes about having Caroline back at home. She is too anxious to make him feel taken care of, but there is some kinship in her presence, some comfort in the fact of another person in the house now that Rosita is gone.

  He looks at his watch again—he has to be outside to meet Forester in seven minutes now anyway. It is for the best that Caroline didn’t come in and settle down. He will attach the little replica of Old North Bridge he has created—it is a little out of proportion with the rest of the landscape, but Eliot doesn’t mind so much; this way it will not be overlooked, which seems important to him. He places it carefully over the curve in the Concord River, which he has painted a shiny navy blue, and then secures it with two dollops of rubber cement.

  “Hello?”

  Eliot has not heard the screen door bang shut this time. “Hello?” the voice comes again, starting up the stairs. It is familiar, but not yet distinct. Eliot remains planted on his knees beside his papier-mâché sculpture, eyes fixed on the doorway as the footsteps approach. Suddenly Rock Coughlin appears in it.

  “Hey!” he says. “What are you kneeling like that for? You scared me.”

  Eliot stares at him.

  “Your sister around?”

  “I don’t know,” Eliot lies, getting to his feet, but Rock is already out of sight—down the hall to Caroline’s room. Eliot hears him knock on the door, turn the knob, open it. The shower is not running and he has not heard Caroline go back downstairs. But there is no sound from her. Rock’s footsteps return.

  “Know where she is?” Rock asks.

  Eliot shakes his head. He is about to insist that she must be here, he has just heard her come in, but something stops him. He is not sure what to make of Rock Coughlin. He is his brothers’ age, but is not as big and loud and altogether incomprehensible to him as they are. Around them, Eliot feels like another species; around Rock, he feels merely different.

  To his dismay, Rock takes a few steps into the room, begins looking around with interest. It is only at this renewed threat to his privacy that Eliot spies the corner of Roberto’s photograph sticking out from under the corner of the papier-mâché project.

  “What’s this?” Rock asks, making Eliot jump. But he is not pointing at the picture, just at the bridge Eliot has secured, which does, he realizes, really look out of proportion.

  “A project.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Boston. That”—Eliot gestures at the offending addition—“is Old North Bridge.”

  “Oh-ho,” Rock says, as if he understands something more complicated and profound than the identity of what he is looking at. “You like it down there?”

  “Down where?”

  “Under the bridge—we used to hang down there, too. You just have to watch out for the park police—they called my folks once.”

  “Oh,” Eliot says. He has never been under Old North Bridge. He has only walked over it, hundreds of times. Eliot looks at his watch; it is time to go outside.

  “I had my first smoke down there, my first kiss. . . .” Rock lets out a little snort of delight. “I even put up my first tag—I used to . . .”

  But Eliot is no longer listening. Caroline’s face has emerged in his doorway, with her finger raised to her lips. She is gesturing frantically, pointing at herself and making a decisive slash with her hand. Not here, Eliot finally realizes she is mouthing.

  Rock has wandered over to the window in his reminiscence, his back turned toward the door. He is playing with the wind chime made of flattened silver spoons and little disks of glass that Eliot’s mother hung up there when he was a baby. Pretty, fragile sounds bounce around the room while he speaks.

  “Okay,” Eliot says, and Caroline’s head disappears immediately.

  “Okay, what?” Rock says, interrupting his own monologue. He backs toward the center of the room and stares into Eliot’s face and then, rapidly, to the now-empty door. “Who are you talking to?”

  “You,” Eliot says.

  “Okay to get grounded for four weeks?” Rock looks skeptical.

  “Yes,” Eliot says gravely. “I mean, okay I have to clean up my room now.”

  “Says who?” Rock walks out into the hallway and looks around.

  “Me,” Eliot says.

  Rock lifts his eyebrows. “Okay,” he says finally, and shrugs. “But I think what you need to do is loosen up—have a little more fun. Not clean your room.”

  Eliot says nothing.

  “Well, all right, then—tell your sister I stopped by.” And then Rock is gone, footsteps banging down the stairs in a sloppy haphazard order. Eliot checks his watch once more—it will take Rock another minute or two to get into his car and be gone, which will make Eliot late. He stands in the middle of the room for another moment and then walks over to the window to monitor Rock’s leaving. Above him the wind chime is still tinkling faintly, a sad, leftover sound.

  IN HIS HURRY to see Caroline, Rock has left his car parked in the middle of the driveway under the bright glare of the sun. When he opens the door, the sour milk smell accosts him with unusual intensity. There is junk all over the floor and some stupid dirty baseball has ended up, God knows how, right smack in the middle of the driver’s seat. A fucking pigsty. A dart of irritation stabs up through Rock—at the car, which is old and putrid-smelling, at the day, which has started all wrong, at himself, for things too vast and vague to itemize. He picks up the ball and hurls it into the rhododendron bushes on the other side of the circular drive, where he hears it drop through the leaves with a satisfying ripping sound. But then as he turns the ignition on he remembers: it is the ball his mother dug out of some box of his childhood possessions and gave him at the surprise party she threw for his mildly retarded cousin Betsy last Thursday night. Possibly the ball he caught from right field during the ’86 playoffs. Why does his mother have to purge her household of his childhood belongings as if they are carriers of the plague? And why does she dump them on him at weird events when he is in between apartments? And why did he just chuck what might possibly be one of the greatest mementos of his adolescence into a fucking king-sized rhododendron bush?

  Rock slams the car door and jogs across the gravel to what is actually a mini-forest of rhododendrons, an ungainly ring of them stretching up the bottom of the hill to the road, each bush sturdy and tough enough to be a small tree. Fighting through the big glossy leaves and springy branches, he feels a sharp pain on his forehead and, when he reaches his hand up to touch it, comes away with blood. “Fuck,” he swears, standing bent with one leg over a low branch and the other twisted awkwardly behind him. He sweeps his eyes over the ground ahead of him—there is a small clearing in the middle of the bushes and to the right side of this is a grayish object that appears to be his ball. Except it isn’t his ball. It is a sneaker, and above the sneaker a leg. Rock raises his eyes and finds himself looking straight at a person—a blond, pink-polo-shirt-wearing boy, to be exact. “What the fuck?” Rock hears himself saying aloud, still frozen in his awkward semi-crouch.

  “Hi,” the boy says in a scared, robotic voice. It is Forester Kittridge, Rock recognizes him now. Rock steps over the branch and works his way into the clearing, where he can now actually see his ball.

  “What are you doing in here?” Rock asks.

  “Looking for something.” Forester is tall and long-headed, oddly unmarked by the gawkiness of adolescence, which gives him the uncanny appearance of a mini-adult. Or a mini-version of his mother, who Rock knows well from his caddying days: an aggressive, slightly cross-eyed woman, notorious for never tipping.

  “Oh, yeah?” Rock casts his eyes around the clearing. Dirt and stones and fallen branches�
�nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Yeah.”

  “You planning on camping out in here?” Rock asks, gesturing at the kid’s backpack, which is substantial.

  “No.” Forester glowers at Rock.

  “Mr. Dunlap know you’re poking around his bushes for buried treasure or whatever?” Rock asks. He is enjoying himself now. The kid is an asshole, that much is written across his face. One of those boys who like to goad weaker, younger children into eating chalk or raw hamburger, or making shit sculptures with their own feces. He is probably blackmailing Eliot into giving him his allowance, or forcing him to buy cigarettes at a dollar a pop.

  Forester shrugs again. But he looks more anxious now. There is sweat beading on his forehead.

  “Well, maybe you and I should go in there and have a little chat with him, just, you know, let him know what you’re after.”

  “Gimme a break,” Forester says. Mr. Dunlap is almost a cult figure in the community—known for his rudeness, for his refusal to let the Higginses’ wedding guests park in his driveway, for having made his own sons clean litter off Route 2 as a punishment for having mooned someone at a drive-through. Rock allows silence to fill the space around them with tension. “I’m just waiting for Eliot,” Forester says finally.

  “Well, why don’t you do your waiting out in the open?” Rock says, stooping to pick up the ball. He cocks his head in the direction of the ragged tunnel through which he came, and Forester follows him with a certain degree of reluctance.

  Once out in the open, Rock glances over at the house and, sure enough, there is Eliot’s little face in the window. Rock raises his arm in an exaggeratedly cheery wave. He has certainly stumbled on to something. Behind him, Forester is looking over his shoulder to the road in what is either an attempt to seem nonchalant or a bona fide calculation of whether he should bolt.

  “So, Forester,” Rock says over his shoulder as he approaches his car, “say hello to your mother—tell her to give me a call about that produce garden she wants to set up.”

  “Whatever,” Forester mutters, and Rock climbs into his stinky car, with the painstakingly retrieved baseball beside him on the seat. He can see the kid glowering after him in the rearview mirror.

  7

  IT IS EMBARRASSING to have slept through breakfast. This is what teenagers do after long nights of drinking and necking and staying awake to watch the sun rise, not middle-aged mothers visiting old family friends. Faith has a vague recollection of Lucy poking her face around the narrow wooden door, smiling, head bobbing vigorously in explanation—breakfast, it must have been—breakfast is in half an hour, or ten minutes, or whatever it was. Faith must have gone promptly back to sleep. She is now pulling a comb through her flattened hair at ten forty-five. She’s not completely well, she imagines Lucy’s sweet but tactless husband Pete would have explained to the other guests. She’s been through a lot. A whole tableful of healthy, stable individuals who’ve been out running and swimming and playing tennis since dawn turn sympathetic but smug, generic faces at her.

  No. This is not the right way to start the day. Faith replaces the image with that of a pretty harbor scene, quiet, a single red boat with a white sail. Picture something soothing when you feel yourself getting anxious, Dr. Marcus says. Something that makes you feel relaxed. She had thought it was her own invention—a unique and individuated image of safety generated by her peace-seeking soul. It was a shock to recognize it, months later, in the December page of Marcus’s own hanging calendar—Monet’s Red Sail Boat. A regurgitated projection of some more articulate, more capable inner eye. It is almost tragic that it works.

  “Faithey.” There is a gentle rapping at the door. Faith shoves the comb into her toilet kit, checks to see that her blouse is buttoned. Lucy’s face peers back around the door, a reality-based déjà vu. Except this time Faith is dressed, standing at the sink, not lolling like some teenage slut on her bed.

  “You’re awake! I saved you some breakfast,” Lucy says, coming through the door like a brisk, reassuring puff of oxygen—a safety line thrown out into the dense, gravityless orbit Faith has been floating in. Faith has known Lucy for thirty-six years now. Together they used to sneak cigarettes at cotillion events, lie out on silver reflective blankets slathered in baby oil, take the bus in to Harvard to sit on the steps of Widener Library smiling at the handsome young men. Lucy is a short woman with an athletic-looking body, compact and tanned, with firm round muscles on the backs of her calves, the swell of her forearms, even the curve of her neck. For ten years in a row she has won her country club tennis tournament in the energetic, good-spirited way tennis tournaments are supposed to be won, not with the sort of catty desperation that scared Faith off the Ponkatawset Club courts. With her sensible brown bobbed hair and clean pink polo shirt, Lucy looks as strong and sturdy as a little rocking horse. Faith would like, for a moment, to fall at Lucy’s feet, hug her competent round knees in an excess of relief. “Oh, you didn’t have to—I’m so embarrassed—so silly of me to sleep so long,” she says instead, lifting a hand to her hair.

  “Can it,” Lucy says. She is a fan of wholesome 1950s expressions—fiddlesticks, blow off steam, okeydoke. Coming from her, they sound exactly right. “Rest and relaxation—that’s what this place is all about. What do you think Pete and I come here for? Now—let’s bring this out to the porch and then I’ll give you the tour. There’s a tennis tournament at four and . . .” Faith finds herself listening instead to the energy crackling from Lucy’s body. What a wonderful mother she must be! If only her own mother had sounded like this. Obediently—carelessly, even—she follows Lucy down the flights of stairs, through the dark cool common rooms, and out into the sunshine.

  From the beginning, Faith did not want to go on this trip to Pea Island. It was Lucy’s idea that she come—that they have some time to rest and catch up and reminisce together. Faith didn’t realize when she agreed that this plan included six of Lucy and Pete’s closest friends from Greenwich and her own former neighbor, Rock Coughlin, who was Pete’s college roommate. Faith has spent the last few weeks worrying that she will be the outsider among this sampling of hearty couples who have weathered marital storms and raised kids together, have cried on each other’s shoulders and flirted with each other’s spouses. Who will probably finish each other’s sentences, speak in code, and like to play charades. In their presence, Faith will be the intruder—the lonely divorcée. The word, at least, is pleasantly exotic. She hopes Lucy has referred to her in such terms—my friend Faith, the divorcée.

  When she has eaten enough of the cinnamon buns and fruit salad to appease Lucy, they begin a walk through the house and around the island, which Faith is amazed to find she remembers quite distinctly. She visited it several times as a teenager, but has not been back for almost twenty-five years. It is a small hump of land, thickly wooded and bean-shaped. There are three rambling, weather-beaten houses owned by Lucy’s family and built by her great-great-grandfather in 1909 for throwing rustic weekend parties and luring the Vanderbilts up from Newport. Each of these has ten to twelve bedrooms, now occupied by a motley crew of cousins and their guests, great-aunts, grandnieces older than Lucy, cousins-in-law, and one mildly deranged uncle who lives in the unwinterized “honeymoon cottage” year-round. Most of whom Lucy cannot explain her exact relationship to. All of whom trace their heritage back to the early days of the Republic. Lucy herself is a great-great-great-grandniece of Betsy Ross; Faith can never remember if this is the one who was married to George Washington or the one who sewed the first Star-Spangled Banner, despite the fact that Lucy has clarified the matter more than once for her. There is an old-fashioned sauna perched precariously on a rocky cliff over the ocean and the remnants of a lovely sculpted garden that has sunk beneath the surface of the sea. There are fluffy, unprickly-looking pine trees that shed long rust-colored needles all over the paths, and, of course, there are no cars.

  Crossing a narrow path that leads to the wild part of the island, Faith ha
s a vague recollection of being groped by Lucy’s drunken father there, against that giant boulder—the picnic stone. He was a sweet man, really—not hard or bullyish, just desperately, desperately—what? lost? Strange, she has never, till this moment, even thought of his advances as anything but sad. Dr. Marcus would certainly think otherwise.

  Faith came here only once with Jack, shortly after they were married, and it was not a fun trip, as she remembers it. Lucy and Jack never liked each other and Jack found the place stifling—not enough space and not enough to do and all these blue-haired old aunts and uncles in your face morning, noon, and night. This was Jack’s criticism. There was some sort of disastrous picnic on the headlands in which Jack did something truly boorish that resulted in, what was it? some sort of accident with a food item, a pie he stepped in or sat on or otherwise ruined.

  Around the corner from the last house, Lucy’s husband, Pete, is practicing his golf swing, hitting balls off an almost trim lawn into the woods. “Faithey!” he calls, dropping the nine iron in his hand. The ease with which he has picked up Lucy’s girlish pet name for her has always struck Faith as endearing. On his tongue it has such an absurd and surprising sound to it, like a frilly nightgown on a football player. Pete is the manliest man Faith knows, except maybe for Jack, who is manly in a quieter, more intense, and, Faith thinks, crueler way. Where Jack likes to drink bourbon straight and climb mountains in torrential downpours without complaining, Pete likes to drink beer and watch football and slap other men on the back in the hearty, comradely way of men in Budweiser commercials. Pete grew up in Yonkers, the son of Irish immigrants, and made millions selling his family car rental business to the Japanese. Lucy’s parents did not approve of him, which has always struck Faith as romantic, suggestive of a great, otherwise hidden, passion.