At the house, Kaykay threw her bouquet toward Grace, but one of the other girls in the shrieking throng caught it. And then Kaykay kissed the black puppy good-bye and gave him to her mother to take care of until her return, and Kaykay and Bob drove off toward Nova Scotia in a storm of rice, an inappropriate sign on their bumper announcing JUST MARRIED, AMATEUR NIGHT.
Cliff put our suitcases and my garment bag bloated with lemon organza in the Volvo and said, “What we ought to do is go take a swim somewhere and cool off before we drive home. And douse the champagne. You brought a bathing suit, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. Kaykay had suggested it, thinking a swim after the wedding rehearsal last night might be nice, but instead we all went drinking at the Brompton Tavern Cocktail Lounge. David and I had gone there once in a while when we were hungry for television; we would sit at the bar and try to nurse our single beers through at least one show. Last night I had sat in a festive booth and drunk gin and tonics.
“Where’s the beach?” Cliff asked.
“I don’t know, somewhere at Lake Samoset. We always swam at the college camp on Hunkins Lake.”
We got into the car and looked at each other, hot and dizzy. He said, “How about there, then?”
A test. “All right,” I said.
He waited. “Where is it?”
“Oh,” I said. “Drive back past the campus.”
The campus at the far end of Main Street had grown crowded with new buildings, confusing memory. Somewhere in there was the auditorium with the old buff-colored mural showing settlers being attacked by Indians, and over the proscenium two admonitions that David always used to delight in, especially because they contradicted each other: ENTER TO LEARN, GO FORTH TO SERVE and IF YOU DO THIS, YOU CAN’T DO THAT. Gone was the yellow frame cottage where the English Department held its classes. We’d sit on the porch steps to smoke a last cigarette before a class began, and in the winter the snowbanks around the steps looked like ashtrays of butts. What had been a new building in our time, the Campus Club, a cinder-block cube containing a lunch counter, shiny Formica tables, racks of paperbacks, and Brompton sweatshirts and beer mugs, now seemed seedy. We had complained then that it resembled a supermarket, and we had loudly mourned the old Campus Club, made from an abandoned classroom, a dirty yet intimate place.
I said, “That’s the president’s house. Turn right.”
And as we drove out of town, past gas stations and trailers, I remembered my Brompton sweatshirt which in Thornhill had become my housework sweatshirt. With the years, its navy blue washed away to a pale lavender stained with copper polish and Clorox, and its softness grew thin and stiff. Eventually the lettering almost disappeared, and a few red flakes were all that was left of BROMPTON STATE COLLEGE and the school emblem; when the words were bright and new, I had worn the sweatshirt inside out. Most everybody did.
After a hamburger stand, we turned and drove to the dirt road that encircled the small lake, the camps like children playing ring-around-the-rosy. And there it was, a dilapidated shack built high for the view.
Our graduation party had been held here. At first David and I had thought we wouldn’t bother to go, sensing it wouldn’t be a good party but an anticlimax. Recovering from finals, still unable to believe that our sixteen years of school were over, we sat dazed on the steps of our apartment house and brushed flies from our beer cans and idly discussed whether or not we should, after all, go. Finally we decided to, because it was the last party.
When we got there, the party had begun; people were swimming in the lake, and clouds of smoke rose from the stone fireplace on the lawn. We went down to the little beach, and David ran splashing in while I waded out slowly. The sun was setting, making a yellow road across the lake.
I dived, and as always was surprised that I couldn’t stay under as long as I could when I was younger, and I came up swallowing water. “Goddamned cigarettes,” I said. I dived again, and this time when I came up too soon I turned over on my back and floated. There was a piece of moon in the sky.
David surfaced near me, choking, his eyelashes stiff and starry with water. “Cigarettes,” he said. “I’ll never live to be thirty.”
“You look like Bambi.”
We floated together, and I tried to understand that school at last had ended, but I couldn’t, so I thought about the times at the lake in Saundersborough.
Raindrops began to plop around us.
“Oh, hell,” David said.
Thunder boomed over the lake, and the rain poured down. We swam to shore and joined the stampede for the camp, and upstairs, in a bedroom where the window was broken and the mattresses on the bunks looked chewed by mice, we peeled off our bathing suits, dried ourselves, and put on our clothes. Then we went downstairs.
The porch was very long and crooked, high above the lake where somebody was still swimming. People sat in broken wicker chairs and put their feet up on the railing, and people sat on the railing, too, and someone was sleeping face down in the hammock. We went over to the picnic table that had been carried here from the lawn when the rain began, and out of the devastation of hard-boiled eggs and soggy hot dog rolls we unearthed the six-pack we’d brought. David opened a beer for me and wandered off. I found an empty chair and placed a damp cushion over the hole in its seat and sat down and watched the lightning.
Somebody said, “Kind of a washout, isn’t it?”
The thunder seemed to be moving away, but the rain still streamed off the roof and splashed past the edge of the railing and thudded into the pine needles far below. I lit a cigarette and watched the fellow beside me squeeze a beer can until it buckled as he talked, and I decided I didn’t like people who did that, although perhaps it was no worse than stripping wet labels off beer bottles, my habit. I sat and dozed and listened to the rain and the talk and the record player until I realized that my cushion had sunk into the hole in the chair, and frayed strands of cane surrounded me.
I grasped the railing and pulled myself out, and strolled over to the living room doorway. Lots of people were playing cards and dancing, one fellow steering in a small circle the girl who slept against his chest. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and wet canvas and beer. I couldn’t see David. It occurred to me that he most likely was under the porch.
I went back to the picnic table for a couple more beers and a can opener. The porch stairs were wet and my hands were full; I felt I had accomplished a great feat when I reached the bottom safely. A few times before we were married and had a place of our own, David and I had lain here beneath the porch. I ducked under the stairs and found the broken slatting and crawled in. The pine needles and old leaves were dry.
“It’s me,” I said. “I brought some more beer, and I remembered the can opener.”
The darkness moved. He said, “Good.”
I sat beside him and looked through the crisscrossed slats at the sheen of the camp’s lights on the black lake. After a time, the swimmer came out of the water, and bare feet slapped on the stairs. A car started up and drove off. Far over the lake I could see a rim of oily yellow lights from town, and now and then the airport beacon swept white across the sky.
David said, “I don’t suppose I’ll be able to change anything at Thornhill. For a while.”
I lit a cigarette and scraped away pine needles until I could push the match head into the earth.
He said, “First-year teacher. I’ll be expected to go along doing everything the way it’s been done forever. I’ll probably have to teach Silas Marner to the sophomores, and no doubt Mrs. Noyes will tell me to have my freshmen make soap carvings of Evangeline.”
I said, “Thornhill’s a lovely town.”
“Oh, yes.”
We had liked it more than any other town we’d seen during David’s interviews.
I said, “And we were lucky to find a house. A house, not an apartment. An upstairs and a downstairs of our very own.”
“Yes.”
I thought about how we’d arr
ange our furniture in the house when we moved in next week, how the dining room would become my study when we could afford a desk, how I would have all the days for writing. All the days ahead, in our house in the north country.
David put his arm around my shoulder and took the cigarette from my fingers and smoked at it. “But after the first year,” he said, “then maybe I can start doing things the way I want to. If I can get them to give me the money to buy a ton of novels, if I can try the writing-through-reading idea—”
He fell silent. We sat and listened to the rain on the lake.
Cliff dived and came up looking like Neptune.
“Well,” he said. “That clears the head.”
We treaded water. Children were screaming and splashing in front of the camps on either side of us.
I swam to shore while Cliff swam farther out, and I started to walk toward the porch, to see whether or not the slatting under the stairs was still broken, but then I turned back and sat down on the beach. I scooped up wet sand and let it dribble through my fingers, building up a castle foundation. This was the way to make the most delicate, most ethereal castles. You could make towers unbelievably fragile.
When Cliff swam in, I was working on the second tower.
I said, “It’s a dribble castle.”
He said, “I’ve been thinking. Instead of going back to Hull, why don’t we drive up to Saundersborough? I’d like to meet Lucy.”
I could feel the beads of water on my body disappearing into the heat of the sun.
“Well,” I said. I hadn’t been back to Saundersborough all year, and I hadn’t seen Lucy since Pam’s birthday party in Cate in March. “Okay.”
We went up to the car, I tugged my beach towel out of my suitcase, and we took off our bathing suits and dried ourselves and got dressed, hidden by trees from the other camps.
As we drove north along the Connecticut River, Cliff said, “I wonder what they do to make wedding cake frosting so awful. This one tasted like margarine. It even looked like it, the old kind.”
“The white kind?”
He glanced at me. “You mean you remember the old oleo?”
“Of course I do. It was white, and you had to beat the color in. Lucy had a wooden butter paddle she used. And then they came out with the kind in a plastic bag and it had a little orange dot you broke and you squished it in,” I said, and stopped. This was what David and I reminisced about, the things we remembered from the time before we knew each other, and we would marvel at the similarities and differences. Now David would say, “My brother and I used to play catch with that oleo bag. We’d sit around listening to the radio and throwing the bag back and forth to work the color in.”
What Cliff said was, “I’ve told my landlord I’m leaving by the end of this month, Emily.”
I looked quickly out my open window for a distraction.
Cliff said, “From Saundersborough, we could drive on up to North Riverton and talk with my folks about moving into the house. We could spend the night.”
There was a fence of twine around the garden beside a farmhouse, and from the twine, like charms on a bracelet, dangled little aluminum pans which frozen meat pies are sold in. I said, “Is that a new kind of scarecrow?”
“Pepsi,” he hummed, “Pepsi’s got a lot to give,” and then we drove on and on without talking.
We came into Saundersborough past the railroad yards. The late sun stretched down across the empty warehouses, the empty cindery tracks. Farther along was a bridge spanning the tracks, and when we were kids and heard a train coming, we would race here as fast as we could, feet pounding, hearts pounding, to wait poised on the bridge for the right moment, and just before the train passed beneath us we would suck up all the saliva in our mouths, lean far over the railing, and spit into the billowing smokestack. Spray would fly up, sooty smoke engulfed us, and as the train roared beneath us we would count the cars.
Later, there were diesel trains, and now there were hardly any trains at all.
Main Street was hot and gritty. Cliff stopped at a light, and I looked at the pastel display of summer colognes in the window of the drugstore. There used to be a soda fountain in that drugstore, and once Susan, at the age of eight, had got sick during a root beer float and had thrown up on the sidewalk outside. Right there, that very spot, and I had stood beside her, shocked and embarrassed, but when people came over to help, Susan and I began to run. Holding hands, Susan sobbing in humiliation, we ran all the way home to Lucy, who took Susan’s temperature and gave her cambric tea. The soda fountain had been replaced a few years ago by a counter filled with Timex watches, transistor radios, and bedpans.
“Where to?”
“Oh.” I kept forgetting he didn’t know. “Straight ahead.”
“Is that the elementary school?”
“Yes, where Lucy works, where I went to school.” It was a gloomy dark-brick building; most of the time its windows were made incongruously cheerful with children’s projects, paper pumpkins, turkeys, Christmas trees, valentines, Easter eggs, but now they were blankly black; school was over. I tried to see myself playing jump rope in the school yard, playing jacks on the school steps, and I tried to see David, whom I hadn’t known then because he was older, playing marbles.
I said, “Have you been to the high school? Saundersborough didn’t play North Riverton in anything, did we?”
“No, North Riverton’s too small. We played Thornhill and such.”
“Oh. Well, the high school’s up that street, but we turn here. That’s the ski factory. That’s where Ned worked.” At the time I didn’t know how he had died, and I understood only that he had gone to work as usual after breakfast, just as Susan and I had gone to school, and that we had come home as usual but he never did. Yet I knew that whatever had happened was at the factory, and for years I didn’t look at the factory when I walked past. I said, “It’s grown a lot since then, of course.”
Now the street was cooler, shaded by trees, welcome and familiar, but I remembered how menacing it could become in the winter when I was little, in the dark that always surprised me when I came out of the movie theater I had entered in daylight for a matinee. It was scary enough to walk home with Susan or Carol or somebody; alone, stark terror accompanied me, a certainty that there were things lurking behind the trees, watching me, waiting to jump out and grab me, and I was nearly hysterical with fear by the time I reached the light and warmth of home. I never told Lucy, however.
We drove past the street on which David’s folks lived in the house I knew best after my home and Ma and Pop’s. Another old house on a tree-shaded street, it had been cozy with friendly old furniture until, during the past ten years, his folks had started buying new colonial imitations, and the house had become so busy with gold eagles on magazine racks and canisters and wastebaskets, wrought-iron eagles over doors and on trivets, and calico eagles quilted into bedspreads, that David said to me he expected all the wings to begin beating at once someday and bear the house up toward the sun.
I smiled. He was very funny.
Cliff looked over at me. “Glad to be home?”
“Well.”
The handsome old houses, the leisurely peaceful streets deep green under the old trees. More of the houses, it seemed, had been turned into apartment houses, curtains in their attic windows. I said, “Here we are,” and we drove up the driveway to the big white colonial.
I said, “Lucy had it painted again, at last.”
“It’s quite a house.”
We parked alongside the ell at the back. Lucy’s Volkswagen was in the barn. I got out of the car and looked around the green yard. The garden had shrunk in the years since Susan and I left—Lucy had said, “I can’t possibly eat all those vegetables by myself, and I can’t give them away because everybody else has gardens, too”—and this summer there were only the raspberry bushes.
I opened the back door and we went into the kitchen. I called, “Hello, Lucy? It’s me, Emily,” and, from habit, op
ened the refrigerator. Inside was the familiar sight of leftovers saved in dishes with covers like little shower caps. “Hungry?” I asked Cliff. “I’m starved.”
After dates, David and I would fool around here in the kitchen, and I’d start coffee, and then we’d sit at that old wooden table, I would sit on his lap, and we’d feed bread into the toaster. Hard-ons, and peanut butter toast.
Cliff said, “Didn’t you get enough wedding cake?”
“I’m always hungry,” I reminded him, and called again, “Lucy?” I went through the doorway, noticing that Lucy still kept a supply of elastic bands on the kitchen doorknob, something I myself did without thinking about it until one time I saw that Susan did also.
In the dining room now there was an overlay of Ma’s possessions, and when we went into the living room the eyes of The Laughing Cavalier over the mantelpiece followed me eerily here as they had in Ma’s living room. Bewildering, this blurring of things which belonged in Lexington with the things which had always been here, but in the midst of it all was Lucy’s desk, as solid as the facts she corrected on it—spelling, arithmetic, the principal products of Holland—or as solid as the facts had seemed to me then.
I said, “That’s Ned,” and pointed to his picture on the console table. It had been taken when he was twenty; he wore a white shirt open at the throat and looked very Byronic.
I watched Cliff tour the room, examining baby pictures, childhood pictures, photographs of Lucy’s classes in which the children were always young but Lucy, standing behind them as they sat with their hands folded primly on their desks, grew older in each, and when he stopped I thought he was looking at the snapshot John had taken after John and Susan’s junior prom, Susan collapsed in a chair, legs outstretched under her gown, her junior prom queen crown of roses slipped down over one ear.
“Isn’t that perfect?” I said. “Utter exhaustion—” and then I saw that he was looking at, instead, the snapshot Carol had taken of David and me outside the high school on a spring afternoon, David clowning, carrying my books. Granted, it was disconcerting that Lucy hadn’t put away the picture, but why did Cliff seem so astonished? Oh, God, hadn’t he realized Saundersborough was David’s hometown, had he assumed we’d met in college? To fill the silence, I said, “There’s Ma’s wedding picture on the bookcase, and Lucy’s,” and as I crossed the room I saw that the wedding picture taken here in this living room after David and I were married was still on the mantelpiece beside John and Susan’s. While I was staying here during the divorce, I’d supposed Lucy planned to put away such pictures discreetly, in time.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 15
