Summer of the Gypsy Moths

by Sara Pennypacker

  Walking closer, I realized he wasn’t so old after all. His wrinkles looked like the kind people got from being outside a lot. He had gray hair, but he was like Heloise that way—her silver hair fooled you. “She definitely told us. But she’s sick today,” I said.

  “Sick?” He smiled as if he figured Louise was pulling a fast one on him. “That’s convenient…the day we open up. Now where is she?”

  He took another step in, but Angel moved to block him. “She’s lying down. She can’t even move. You have to leave.”

  “We’re opening the cottages,” he repeated. “I only have the weekend, and there’s a lot to do.” He walked to the stairs and called up. “Louise?”

  “We’re going to do it,” I said. Angel spun around to shoot me a glare, but I didn’t see any other way. Besides, my blabber mode had really kicked in. “That’s what she told us: ‘You girls help open those cottages, since I’m sick.’ She told us to help you open up the cottages today, Mr. Nickerson.”

  Mr. Nickerson cocked his head to eye me. “You’re the niece, right?” he asked.

  “Great-niece,” I said. “Stella. And this is Angel. We’re ready to help open the cottages for my great-aunt. Who’s just sick today, that’s all.” I held my breath and tried to look innocent and helpful.

  After a minute, he shrugged and lifted a bunch of keys from his belt and thumbed up a long iron one. “All right, then. This is the master.” He pointed over my shoulder to an identical key hanging from a hook beside the door. “That’s yours. Grab it. And my name is George, okay?”

  “Okay. Got it. George.” I wrapped my fingers around the key, hard and knobby as bone, and thought suddenly of Hansel and Gretel, of how they fooled the witch.

  We followed George out to his beat-up green truck, parked next door in front of the cottages. He opened the cab door and a yellow lab bounded out and tore around in circles, as if he’d just been sprung from prison. George pulled a wooden sign, painted with the words LINGER LONGER COTTAGE COLONY, from the bed of the pickup and headed over to the signposts next to the road.

  The cottages were laid out in a semicircle at the bottom of the horseshoe driveway next to Louise’s house. When I’d first arrived, I had tried peering into the windows, but all the shades were down. “Puh! You’ll see ’em soon enough,” Louise had answered when I’d asked to go inside. “You’ll be sick of the sight of them, after you’ve done a couple of changeovers this summer.”

  As George hung the sign, I noticed for the first time that the cottages were identical, except for the names lettered above the front doors: SANDPIPER, TERN, PLOVER, and GULL. Identical. The same pink roses climbed up the shingled sides of each one and tumbled down again; all the trim was whitewashed, and the doors all the same pale blue. Everything about the scene looked old and soft, as if it had been drawn in pastel. Lucky Charms colors, I’d called them when I was little.

  It looked as if the same artist had drawn George—he wore a faded blue denim shirt rolled up at the sleeves and paint-spattered khaki pants. His hair was a little shaggy, as if he was the kind of person who liked it short, and he kept meaning to get to the barber, but it just hadn’t happened for a while. George belonged with these cottages, and so did his dog, with his soft sandy fur, snuffling in the hydrangea bushes beside us.

  Angel, on the other hand, looked like a neon sign with her hot-pink tank top and lime-green track pants. Beside her, I probably looked like a pencil sketch with my gray cutoff sweats and my black T-shirt and my boring brown hair. Neither of us fitted in with the Linger Longer cottages, settled there along their good-luck horseshoe driveway. No connections. Anyone could see that.

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” George said. “Those cottages aren’t going to open themselves, you know.”

  With each step away from our house, and what was in the den, I felt lighter and calmer. George unlocked the first cottage, Tern, and waved us inside. His dog took off to sniff out the place, but George stayed put in the entryway. “Now, Louise said you two might be helping out with the changeovers this year. We talked Thursday. She didn’t say a word about feeling poorly, so it musta come on sudden.”

  I caught Angel’s eye when he said Louise’s name, and she looked as guilty as I was feeling.

  George didn’t seem to notice, though. “We might as well go over things from the beginning,” he said. He pointed to a long iron key hanging from a hook on the inside of the door. It looked like the master keys, except for a waxy paper disk, hand-lettered with TERN, tied to it. “They show up, you open the cottage with your master, you hand ’em this key—their key. You remind ’em of what’s in the agreement: They lose that key, it’s fifty dollars, period. Only one locksmith on Cape Cod I even know of who’ll make a key like that anymore. It hasn’t happened in at least twenty years—hard to lose a key that big, I guess, but still, that’s the rule, okay?”

  Angel and I nodded. Then George walked around, snapping up the shades and shoving open the windows. Dust motes whirled up through bars of sunlight against dark wood paneling. I looked around the brightening cottage. Three doors stood open on the back wall: two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom. The room we were standing in had a living area over to the left and kitchen stuff on the right. The kitchen was painted white. It had just room for a table with four chairs, and barely enough counter space to make a sandwich. You’d have to be efficient in a place like this; you could only have the essentials, and you’d have to keep things tidy. I liked that.

  “Now, checkout time.” George tapped a yellowed notice on the wall. “It’s ten o’clock, no exception, because the next tenants come in at three. That doesn’t give you much time for the changeovers.”

  He paused and then nodded at Angel and me as if we’d just said something and he was agreeing with it. “I’m glad she’s got you two this year. Tell the truth, I’ve been a little worried about her, what with her heart.”

  Angel and I exchanged a quick glance at that.

  “Her heart?” I asked. “What’s the matter with her heart?”

  “Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. But you two do the heavy cleaning, all right?” George said. “Course, that means you keep the tips—don’t go splitting ’em with her if all she’s doing is running the laundry through, you doing all the rest.”

  “Tips?” It was the first time since we’d left the house that Angel had said a word. There was a look in her eyes I couldn’t figure out—like she was just now waking up. “They leave tips?”

  George nodded with a little chuckle. “Usually. Depends on what hoodlums their kids were. Cleaning fee’s built into the rental charge—they already paid it. Louise says they tip outta guilt: Their kids track sand everywhere, fill the teacups with hermit crabs, leave Popsicles melted on the furniture, that kinda thing. Fifteen, twenty dollars—you should ask her, though. I’d better get the linens.”

  “Each cottage?” Angel asked, and I could practically see her ears perk up. “Each cottage leaves fifteen or twenty dollars? Each week?”

  “That’s about right. I’ll get those linens now.” And before we could think of anything to stop him, George left.

  Angel and I sprang to the window. I could tell by her face she was as scared to death as I was. But he didn’t go toward our house, only to his truck. “Maybe we should tell him,” I said, my heart still hammering in my chest and my legs going cottony again, as if a puff of wind could knock me off my feet. “Angel, I’m scared.”

  Angel stared at me, looking like she was caught between snarling and fainting. Before she could do either, George was back, talking over a stack of sheets and towels as if he’d never left. “There are two twins and a double in each cottage. Three sets of sheets, three blankets. Towels for four.”

  He went into the bedroom on the right and we followed. The room was barely big enough for two twin beds and a narrow bureau under the window between them. A row of hooks hung over one bed, and a bookshelf over the other. George dumped the linens on a bed. “There’s a
backup set of everything, means you don’t have to do the wash at changeover time. Store the extras up in the main house, otherwise they get musty—can’t help it in the cottages, no heat, so close to the water. That’s the next thing….” George nodded out toward the kitchen. “We’ll have to give the counters and cabinets in the kitchens and bathrooms a good wash. They’re all cleaned in September, but things get a little moldy over the winter—”

  “Bleach kills mold!” If I hadn’t still been so nervous, I would never have blurted that out with Angel standing there. I bit my lip before I could say anything else, but it was too late—Angel was rolling her eyes, setting up for a sarcastic remark about Heloise.

  But George spoke before it came to her. “That’s right. That’s exactly what we use. It’s in the shed. I don’t leave it out, all these kids coming,” he said. “What’d you say your name was?”

  I told him.

  “Stella. ‘Stella by Starlight.’ I’ll remember that.”

  And then I didn’t care that Angel was in the room. “You know that song? My father named me after that! He thought it was the prettiest song in the world.”

  “It is—that’s the truth,” George said. “Pretty song for a pretty girl.” He dropped his head then, as if he was worried he’d said something wrong. I smiled at him to show him he hadn’t, and he smiled back—a nice smile, which crinkled his eyes nearly closed. “Your daddy’s got good taste,” he said.

  I fought to keep my smile in place, but my mouth filled with salty water, as if I’d been hit by a wave.

  “Oh, now…oh, now, sorry,” George said. He took a step toward me, and then shoved his hands into his pockets. “Stupid of me…. I guess if you’re here, he’s not…I’m sorry.”

  I swallowed. “It’s okay. I never knew him. Bleach and soap,” I said. “I’ll start in the bathroom.” And I walked out, keeping my back straight.

  In the bathroom, though, I forgot about everything. I know it sounds crazy to think that a tiny bathroom could fill a person with joy, but this one did. The pine boarding was painted a pale yellow, the color of butter. Whenever I’d pictured the perfect house, it was this exact color. The shelves and windowsills were whitewashed, and the curtains were checkered crisp blue and white. I raised the window and a breeze immediately pillowed the curtains out, as if the room had been waiting all these months to take a nice breath of fresh air.

  The bathroom reminded me of a summer day at the beach, with all those sunny colors and the salty breeze. And with all those seashells.

  A huge clamshell, cupped like a palm, sat beside the sink ready to hold a bar of soap. Drifts of various shells ran along the windowsill and the long, narrow shelf that spanned the whole wall; they were mounded on top of the medicine cabinet and heaped at the clawed foot of the sink. I wondered how many kids it had taken over how many summers to fill this bathroom.

  I picked up a little moon snail shell. It spiraled down, as if it knew where it was going, as if the center of all things was right inside itself. I had a funny urge to swallow it, to make all that perfect wholeness part of me. Instead, I pressed it to my cheek, felt its cool, smooth thinness, and closed my eyes.

  Suddenly I was aware of someone in the doorway. I dropped the shell, and it cracked on the tile floor.

  George set a jug of bleach down and gathered up the pieces and laid them back on the shelf.

  “I broke it,” I said. “And it was so beautiful.”

  “Oh, I like the broken ones fine,” George said. He picked up a sand dollar. It was bleached white, at least four inches across, pretty as a sugar cookie. He snapped it in half, and I gasped.

  George held the palm of his hand out to me and tapped the broken shell over it. A tiny white chip fell out, and then another. “Look here,” he said. “Inside here, these are the teeth. They look like doves, don’t you think? A lot of folks take the sand dollar as a message about God and Jesus and all—the nail holes of the cross on the shell, the little doves inside, you see—and that’s all right, I guess. But what I see are the doves being released. Now, I see a broken shell and I remind myself that something might have needed setting free. See, broken things always have a story, don’t they?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t think I agreed with him, but I liked imagining it might be true.

  “Place like this, families on vacation—well, you’d better get used to things getting broken. Why, I keep a stack of bed slats in the shed because five or six get broken every year. Kids just have to jump on beds, I suppose.”

  “You could put a sign up,” I said. “No jumping on the beds!”

  George laughed hard at that. “Oh, no,” he said. “I wouldn’t even want to live in a world where kids don’t jump on beds. No, I don’t mind any of the broken things. I like to figure out their stories.” He turned away then, as if he was embarrassed he’d said too much, and set the sand dollar halves carefully back on the shelf.

  I didn’t think he’d said too much. In fact, if things were different, I thought there might be a lot more I would want to ask him about broken things. Or whatever else he wanted to talk about.

  CHAPTER 5

  There sure was a lot to do. We laid out cakes of Ivory in their waxy wrappers by the sinks, hung dish towels on wooden spindles, filled salt and pepper shakers, lined cupboards with fresh shelf paper and garbage pails with trash bags, made beds, and checked lightbulbs. We swept down cobwebs and escorted hundreds of daddy long-legs outside, and set mousetraps under the sinks. “Mice,” George muttered. “They’d walk away with these cottages, you give them half a chance.”

  I kept stealing nervous glances at Angel, sure she would just disappear. The funny thing was, she didn’t act at all concerned about losing the morning. She trotted along with George, looking fascinated at whatever he was saying and happy to do whatever he asked. I could barely recognize her as the girl who would sulk and glare her way through a silent weekend. And she sure didn’t look at all like a girl who was itching to get onto the Mid-Cape Highway heading west. That girl could lie with her whole self.

  Finally, George said, “That does it.” We went outside and he explained the plan. “There are three cottages left, and three of us. You know what to do now. I’ll take Gull; Miss Angel, you take Plover; and Sandpiper is yours, Stella by Starlight. Okay?”

  We nodded, but I could see Angel didn’t like the plan very much. I tried to catch her eye so I could tell her she should just slip away, but she had turned to follow George, who was opening up Plover for her.

  I unlocked Sandpiper’s door and headed to the kitchen to get started. The oilskin tablecloth sprigged with strawberries struck me first. Then the cat-shaped cookie jar. I spun around. A stack of puzzles centered on the lobster-pot coffee table in front of the gold plaid couch—yes. In the bedroom: a lighthouse lamp—yes. In the bathroom, two brass anchor hooks, a seahorse shower curtain—yes!

  I flew over to Plover, yanked open the screen door, and ran inside.

  “Oh my God!” I cried.

  “What? What?” I could hear Angel calling behind me, but I was already flying over the lawn to Gull and banging open the door. Inside, I went from room to room, still barely believing it.

  George was running water into a pail in the kitchen. He turned when he heard me. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “They’re all…they’re all the same!” I laughed.

  “Well, a course they are. It’s a cottage colony.”

  “No, I mean they’re exactly the same! Exactly!”

  George put his pail down to study me. “And you like that, huh?”

  “Yes, sir. I like that a lot.” Which was an understatement.

  George broke into a slow smile. “I could use a break, Stella by Starlight,” he said. He sat at the kitchen table and patted the chair beside him. I sat down. He started to pull out his pipe but seemed to have second thoughts about smoking in here and took out a couple of toothpicks instead. He offered me one, and I put it in the corner of my mouth the way he did and tried
to act as though I chewed toothpicks all the time.

  “All right then,” he said when he had worked the toothpick to where he wanted it. “My parents built this place before I was born. In the forties, right after the war. The soldiers were back, everybody was getting married and having babies. People wanted to go on vacations again, and they sure loved to go places in their big cars. But things were still scarce after the rationing and all. My mother drew up one set of plans, handed them to my father, and said, ‘Buy four of everything. It’s cheaper that way.’

  “The cottages are sixteen feet square—no bigger than your average living room. Lumber came in sixteen-foot lengths then, so no waste. The bedrooms—now the bedrooms are an architectural marvel, as far as I’m concerned. They’re six feet by eight feet. But they’ve got everything you need: a place to sleep, a place to hang your clothes, a shelf for books, a light to read by. And the bathrooms are only four feet wide. I tell you, my mother was a genius. She insisted everything be plain; you can see that. She knew people wouldn’t mind that in a vacation place. Look at this.” George pointed to a cabinet behind him.

  I nodded.

  “That’s knotty pine for you. It’s cheap, ’cause the knot-holes bleed sap through forever. Probably ten coats of paint on these cabinets. And it still bleeds through.” He leaned back and gazed around the cottage. “I keep wondering if I should update, put in televisions or internet, modernize. But everybody who stays here says no, don’t change a thing, it’s so peaceful. So there you are. Plain and simple, and all exactly the same, since 1946.”

  “And then you were born?” I prompted. I wasn’t ready to stop listening to him.

  George shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth, nodding. “Yep. I was one of those babies everybody was having after the war. Boomers. I’m sixty-four—probably too old to be fishing for a living, but too late to learn anything else, I guess.”