by Finny (v5)
Then they would break for coffee, which Earl would pour out into the china cups. He made regular for Mr. Henckel, and decaf for himself and Finny. Finny began to like the taste of the coffee, probably because her cup was filled mostly with milk and sugar. At some point Mr. Henckel would fall into a nap, and Earl and Finny would clear the cups away, then go into Earl’s room to hang out, or into the fields outside his house. They got to the point where they just went through these stages without asking each other; they’d grown comfortable that way, accustomed to their routine.
Once, walking in the hills, Earl said to Finny, “It must be nice having dinner with your whole family.” It was December, sunny and cold, a day after Finny’s school had let out for winter break. They were walking behind Earl’s house, by a little stream that trickled through some rocks. There were brittle shelves of ice over the water, which Finny liked to crunch with her feet as she walked.
“Sometimes,” Finny said. “But not as much as you’d think.” She felt bad the moment the words left her mouth.
But Earl didn’t seem to mind. “Why?” he asked.
The valley was quiet, and only the wind whistled in her ears. She thought Earl seemed down, and she felt the need—as would often be the case in their lives—to make him feel better.
“Because I always feel like I’m doing the wrong thing,” Finny finally said. It was something she had never tried to put into words. “I feel like I’m not the person my parents want me to be.” She felt a sharp pain behind her eyes, and realized she could have cried.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Earl said.
They walked on, up the hill to the pasture where they had sat together that first afternoon when they’d met. It felt like such a long time ago to Finny, though it had only been a couple months. Now Earl led the way. He had a silly shuffling walk when he climbed hills, because his legs were so short. Finny always laughed a little when he was in front of her, but she never let him see her doing it. It wasn’t out of meanness she was laughing. It wasn’t like the way she laughed when she fed Raskal under the table and her dad got angry. It was more like the way parents laugh at young children, or the way her aunt Louise laughed at her cats when they batted their toys around the living room. There was something warm and protective about it, tender actually, though Finny hated words like tender. She could never explain the feeling to Earl, so she kept it to herself.
It was getting dark. The sky was rolling to reveal its silver belly. Already, lights were coming on in the houses. These were the shortest days of the year, when night arrived at five o’clock and you woke up in the same darkness you went to bed in. Finny had to leave Earl’s house earlier and earlier so that she didn’t break her mother’s rule of getting home before dark.
“Are you cold?” Earl said.
“Not really,” Finny said. “We can stay out a little longer.”
They walked over the top of the hill and kept going, into a copse of trees that cast long shadows in the low sun. Finny’s face stung from the wind, and she sniffed a little because the cold was making her eyes tear up. She heard a twig snap under her foot, and Earl turned to see if she was okay.
“Nothing,” Finny said about the twig, though she’d felt a twinge of nervousness when Earl had turned around, as if he were going to say something important.
They kept on, feet rustling the tall grass. In the distance Finny saw some horses with blankets on their backs, walking toward a barn. Everything was quiet now. Earl stopped and turned toward her.
“I think anyone would like you,” he said.
“That’s nice,” Finny said, wanting to say more, but not knowing what.
“You must think my dad and I are strange.”
Finny was shaking her head, but all she could get out was the word “No.”
“I just want you to know how nice it’s been having you come over.”
“Earl,” Finny said.
Then he kissed her. It was the first time Finny had been kissed, and she felt his mouth like a warm fruit bursting on her tongue.
“I love you,” Earl said.
“I love you, too,” Finny said.
Then they walked back to his house.
Chapter4
Harsh Consequences
That evening, when Finny got back to her house, her mother was at the sliding door in back. The sun had just set, and the purple sky was reflected in the glass. Laura’s shape looked like an apparition behind it.
Laura opened the door. “You’re late,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Finny said. “After my lesson I had to—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“But—”
“The first thing any person judges you on is punctuality,” Laura said with a severe expression on her face. Finny’s mother rarely got angry with Finny. She was more the type to sigh and leave a room than to yell at or hit her children. It was as if she didn’t want to risk getting tangled up with them, so she kept a careful distance. Several times, though, when some point of honor had been violated, when shame drifted like a storm cloud over the family, Finny had seen Laura furious. Her anger was much sharper and more enduring than Stanley’s bursts of temper, which went off like firecrackers and disappeared just as quickly. Laura got a sour, disgusted look on her face when she was mad, and she squinted up her eyes at you. It was how she looked now.
“It won’t happen again,” Finny said as she slid past Laura, into the house.
“No, it certainly won’t,” her mother said, speaking in a low voice, through her teeth, as if trying to hold something back behind them.
“I’m going to wash up for dinner.”
“Just wait, just wait,” Laura said, grabbing Finny’s arm and yanking it so hard Finny felt her shoulder nudging out and back into the socket.
They were in the mudroom, where Raskal slept and ate his meals. There was a smell like sawdust from his food. It always felt cold in this room, because of the tiles and the drafty door, and now Finny shivered. They faced each other.
“Listen to me,” Laura said. “You’re not having dinner with us tonight. You can eat in your room.”
“Why?”
“Because you need time to think about what you did.”
“What are you talking about?” Finny said.
“Your behavior,” Laura said. “This trickery.” She pronounced the word like someone in old Salem might have pronounced witchcraft. “Maybe a little consideration will make a difference.” Finny had heard grown-ups talk in this righteous way before, when they wanted to make it clear they were inconveniencing themselves for your sake.
“A difference in what?”
“Your morals,” Laura said.
“What’s wrong with my morals?” Finny asked.
And then something surprising happened. She saw her mother’s stern expression buckle, the way a very large and imposing building might buckle under certain strains. Almost instantly it collapsed. Her mother was in tears. Laura had a silly, hiccuping way of crying, and Finny had the impulse to pat her on the back.
“To think,” Laura said through her sobbing. “To think you were fooling us all this time.”
“Fooling you about what?”
“All your lessons. The freedom we gave you. It was our mistake, and now we must suffer for it.”
If she hadn’t been so angry at her mother, Finny might have felt sorry for Laura, who made it seem as if she had no part in the decisions that were made, as if the world simply tilted in certain directions, and she was a ball that rolled however the ground sloped.
“The worst part was what you did to your father,” Laura went on. “Getting his hopes up and toying with him that way. You could see how happy you were making him. All he ever wanted was for you to play Bach.”
“He liked my Bach.”
“And the whole time you were doing it just so you could go off and kiss that boy. He looks like he’s ten years older than you, Finny. I’ve seen him. He probably has a wife and chi
ld somewhere.”
Finny couldn’t imagine how her mother knew she had been kissing Earl. It happened less than an hour ago—she’d hardly become accustomed to the fact herself. And now it was being yanked from her, that memory, that moment, torn from her hands and trampled on.
“Earl is fifteen, Mom. Relax.”
“We let you come and go from this house, day after day. We didn’t ask any questions, because we trusted you. We thought you had our best interests in mind, the way a child should with her parents. But you didn’t care about anyone but yourself.”
“Who told you?” Finny asked.
“That’s not important. You lied to us.”
“I didn’t lie. I was taking lessons from Mr. Henckel.”
“You were taking lessons from that sexual predator. I can’t have you sneaking around already. It’s too early for that. Not that any time would have been good. But you’re fourteen years old, Finny. It’s not right. You’re lucky we found out. You’re going to be grounded for the rest of your vacation. No one could ever become a lady the way you’re going.”
“Mom, I want to be a lady about as much as you’d like to stick your head up Raskal’s ass.”
Laura let out a gasp like she’d been socked in the stomach. Her forehead was wrinkled, and Finny saw she was ready to start crying again. “What you don’t seem to understand, Finny,” Laura said, “is that I’m not doing this to torture you. I love you and I want the best for you.” Her voice caught when she said that, and then she did begin to cry.
When Stanley came home, Finny pleaded with him. She caught him in the upstairs hallway, between their bedrooms. Stanley had his suit jacket tossed over his shoulder, and was clearly on the way to “brush his teeth.”
“We can’t have you sneaking around,” he told Finny. “That’s the bottom line.” And then he quoted, “‘Happiness is a working of the soul in the way of excellence or virtue.’” He paused to allow the idea to penetrate, and seemed to contemplate whether to attribute the quotation. In the end he held off, probably because of the solemnity of the occasion.
“You have to understand,” Finny said. “I wasn’t lying to you. Please. Listen to me, Dad. I wanted to take lessons. I want to take them.”
But Stanley shook his head. “You can take lessons with someone else. And you won’t have the distraction of that deviant.”
“He’s not a deviant,” Finny snapped back. To hear Earl talked of that way was like having her hand slammed in a door. “And anyway, I’d rather be fondled by a deviant than have to listen to another one of your lectures.”
Stanley’s face colored, but he just shook his head. She could see he’d resolved to stay calm.
“Well you might just have your wish,” Stanley said. “You might not have to listen to me for a very long time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to go back to your room now.”
“Please, Dad,” Finny said, and felt her voice catch in her throat. She began to cry. There was no way to stop it. The tears just streamed from her, like she’d been slit open. “Please, please,” she kept saying.
And Stanley stood there, shaking his head, in a way that was now more sad than stubborn. She saw him through her tears, the hall lights like sunbursts in her bleary vision.
She spent the week and a half of her vacation at home, watching television and movies, flipping through mystery novels and comic books, trying to find a gap of time she could squeeze a call to Earl into. As long as she stayed inside, her parents let her be; they seemed busy with their own plans and discussions. Once, when Stanley was at work and Laura was out getting groceries, Finny dialed Earl’s number, and listened to the phone thrill once, twice, three times on the other end. An image of Earl’s house, the day the brown station wagon wasn’t there, flashed in her mind.
Then someone picked up. “Hello?” It was Earl’s voice, distant and awash in a tide of static. But still him. Earl. Happiness flooded her heart.
“Earl, it’s me. Finny.”
“Finny!” he said. He never held back with her. It was something she’d loved about him from the moment they’d met, the way he opened himself to her. She felt as if she could curl up in the space he’d given her. “I was so worried about you. When your mom called and said you couldn’t take lessons anymore. I didn’t know what happened.”
“My mom caught us kissing.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Finny said.
“When am I going to see you?” Earl asked. It was a question each would ask the other many times over the years.
“Soon, I hope,” Finny said. “But we’re going to need a new plan. I’m grounded now. They think I was sneaking around to get to spend time with you.”
“Well, you sort of were.”
“I know. But they have the idea that you’re a lot older and taking advantage of me.”
“Oh,” Earl said, and Finny could tell by how his voice sounded that he was blushing. He would always be reserved, and a little formal, about sex. She wished that she could reach through the telephone wire now and touch his face.
“But it’s okay,” Finny said. “They don’t understand that I like being taken advantage of.” It sounded like the kind of sexy thing a woman might say in a movie, and Finny laughed at the role she was straining toward: a heroine, some breezy beauty. It wasn’t her. She was just Finny.
“Listen, Earl,” Finny said, “I have to get off the phone soon. My mom is out buying groceries and if she catches me on the phone with you she’ll kill me and probably you, too. But I just wanted to say that I still love you, and we’re going to figure something out.”
This kind of talk, this saying I love you, it had felt so odd that first time, so desperate and dramatic. Making too much of herself. That’s the phrase that had come to mind, a phrase Finny had heard used to describe silly women, who cried and fretted over burnt omelets or stained rugs. But now these theatrical words— I love you, I need to see you—it took almost no effort to say them. When she was with Earl they came to Finny’s lips as naturally as hello and goodbye.
“I love you, too,” Earl said. “Still.”
· · ·
Sometimes Sylvan visited Finny during her imprisonment. He was spending his vacation at the library, working on a paper about the Constitution and its belief in “the inherent goodness of man.” That’s how he described it to Finny, and she told him it sounded like something their dad would say.
“Maybe,” Sylvan said, a little defensively. “But only because it’s a smart idea. I thought of it completely myself.”
“I’m glad you’re using your powers for good.”
“Someone has to,” Sylvan teased her.
“And I definitely don’t want to be that person,” Finny told him.
Another time she had been crying. It was an embarrassing thing that happened to her every now and again over the course of that week and a half, and as usual, she tried to hide it. But since Earl had entered her life, she’d found that for some reason it was much easier for her to cry. Anything could start it. A pretty piece of music. The way the hills looked on a clear evening. She’d never understood why people cried so much—at the end of movies, or when they got a nice letter. But now she saw something about the world, about how beautiful things are always a little sad, too. She understood that, in a way, she was crying for Earl, but also for other things she had lost, or would lose. And she knew that this feeling, this endless, inconsolable longing, would forever be a part of her life, a part of what it meant to truly love. It was a vision Earl had given her without knowing it, and in the end she could never say whether it was good or bad, only that she had it now, and could never give it back.
A knock on the door.
“Go away,” Finny said through tears.
Another knock. “It’s me, Finny.” Sylvan’s voice.
She wiped her eyes on her shirt and let her brother in. He sat down on her bed.
“I’m sorry you’re having
such a crappy vacation,” he told her. “This sucks.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to this. She was concentrating too hard on not crying, and the roof of her mouth hurt. She couldn’t tell why her brother was suddenly being so nice to her.
“Thanks,” Finny said.
“Mom’s just so pissed off. You know how she gets. Like the family’s future depends on it.”
She hadn’t heard her brother criticize their parents before. She stayed quiet, waiting to hear what he would say.
“I think she’ll get over it, though,” Sylvan said. “It’s just a boyfriend.”
“The thing is,” Finny said, “I can’t figure out how she knew.”
“There’s lots of ways,” Sylvan said. “Anyway, it’s only three more days. Then once we’re back at school, I think it’ll be over.”
“But they won’t let me take lessons with Mr. Henckel again.”
“Who knows? Maybe they will.”
She didn’t see why her brother was being so optimistic about the situation. Nothing ever worked in her favor with her parents.
“Would you do me a favor?” Finny asked her brother, since he was being nice. “I mean, if I needed it.”
“Sure, Fin. Anything.”
“If I want to get a message to Earl sometime, would you bring it to him? Like maybe a letter, or just something I tell you.”
“I could do that.”
“I don’t have anything right now. I just mean, it might be hard for me to talk to him sometimes.”
“He’s the reason you’re in trouble.”
“Yeah, well,” Finny said, and shrugged.
“Anyway, of course,” Sylvan said.
Then Finny began to explain where Earl’s house was, past the fountain, over the—but Sylvan stopped her.
“It’s more of a birdbath,” he said.
“How do you—” Then it hit her. She didn’t even need to finish the sentence. Sylvan must have realized, too, because his mouth hung open a little.
“I’m sorry, Fin,” he finally said, with an awful, sad look in his eyes. “I really am.”
