It is then, just as Sid rises to check on the steaks (nobody here wants anything but rare and rarer and he’d be offended if they did), that the first eruption of thunder rolls across the lake to shake the house and rattle the ice cubes in the drinks Miriam has just freshened all the way around. The sky goes instantly dark and it’s just as if a shade has been drawn over the day. She’s wondering if she should go out to the kitchen and rummage through the drawer for the candles left over from Hanukkah when the storm chases a cool breeze through the screens and Marsha waves her napkin in front of her face, letting out a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” she says. “Oh, yes, bring it on.”
The first raindrops, big and slow and widely dispersed, begin to thump at the shingles and there’s Sid, with his muscled arms and bald head, out on the deck, hustling the lid off the grill and flipping the steaks, the worn boards spotted all around him. Another blast of thunder. “Better hurry, Sid!” David calls and then it’s really coming down, the original deluge, and this is funny, deeply, infectiously funny, Sid flipping steaks and wet through in an instant, because there’s no harm, no harm at all, and if there’s a drop or two on the platter of meat, which he’s covering even now, what does it matter? They’ll have candles, they’ll eat, and the evening, with its rising fertile smell of grass and the earth at the edge of the woods, will settle in around them, as cool and sweet as if the whole neighborhood were air-conditioned.
[I see I’ve written myself into the scene after all, a refugee from my own fractured family, at peace in the moment. Fair enough. But peace neither lasts nor suffices, and the fact was that Lester and I pursued the available pharmacopoeia far more assiduously than Miriam could ever have imagined. We were stoned at that very moment, I’m sure of it, and not merely on anything so innocuous as marijuana—stoned, and feeling blessed. Feeling, in the midst of all that radiant love and the deepest well of tranquillity, that we were getting away with something.]
Time jumps and jumps again, the maples struck with color, the lake giving up a thin sheet of wrinkled ice along the shore, then there’s the paucity of winter with its skeletal trees and the dead fringe of reeds stuck like an old man’s beard in the gray jaws of the ice. Twice the car gets away from her on the slick streets, the passenger’s side door taking the brunt of it so she has to go through all sorts of gyrations to lean over the back seat and swing open the door there for Susan when she picks her up from ballet or violin lessons. It seems like it’s always raining. Or sleeting. And if there’s a sun up there in the sky, somebody ought to get out a camera and show her the evidence. She lives for summer, that’s what she tells Marsha on the phone and anybody else who’ll listen, because she’s got thin blood, and dark at four-thirty in the afternoon is no way to live. Yes. Sure. But it seems like the summer’s gone before it even begins and then it’s winter again and the winter after that, months spinning out until the pointer stops on a day in March, gray as death, Susan working against the chill in the unheated basement with the girls from the Explorers’ Club at school, building a canoe from a kit shipped in all the way from Minnesota while Miriam tiptoes around upstairs, arranging warm-from-the-oven oatmeal cookies on a platter and pouring hot cocoa from the thermos into six porcelain teacups, each with its own marshmallow afloat in the center like a white spongy island.
When she opens the basement door there’s an overpowering smell of epoxy and the distilled vinegar Sid got for cleanup, and she worries about that, about the fumes, but the girls seem oblivious. They cluster around her in a greedy jostling pack, hands snatching at the cookies and the too-hot cups, all except for Janet Donorio, a poised delicate girl with fade-away eyes who lifts the last cup from the tray as if she’s dining with the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace, and why can’t Susan be more like that? But Susan has no sense of herself—she already has three cookies clenched in her hand, privilege of the house, as she stabs her tongue at the marshmallow in her cup, a mustache of chocolate sketching itself in above her upper lip.
“Shouldn’t you girls have some ventilation in here?” she says, just to hear herself, but they’re fine, they assure her, and it’s going great, it really is.
The canoe, lying overturned on a pair of sawhorses, has been a long winter’s project, Sid doing the lion’s share of the work on weekends, though the girls have been fairly diligent about the hand-sanding, the cutting and fitting of the fiberglass cloth and the slow smoothing of the epoxy over it. It’s just that they’re at an age when gathering for any purpose outside of school is a lark and they can’t help frittering away their time gossiping, spinning records, dancing to the latest beat or craze or whatever it is, their thin arms flailing, hair in motion, legs going like pogo sticks. They make fast work of the cookies and chocolate. And now, sated, they watch her warily, wondering why she’s lingering when it’s clear her motherly duties have been dispensed with, and so she collects the cups, sets them on the tray and starts back up the stairs.
Thanks to Sid, who’s a father like no other despite the fact that he has to drag himself home every night after a stifling commute and the kind of hard physical labor on one jobsite after another that would prostrate a man half his age, the canoe is ready for its maiden voyage by the time the ice shrinks back from the shore and the sun makes its first evanescent return. Miriam sits stiffly on the bench by the playground, Marsha beside her—freezing, actually, because with the way the wind’s blowing down the length of the lake from the north a windbreaker just isn’t enough—while the girls divide themselves democratically into two groups of three, roll up their jeans in the icy shallows and see the first group off in a mad frantic windmilling of forearms and paddles. “Be careful now!” she calls, and she’s pleased to see that her daughter has been gracious or at least patient enough to wait her turn in the second group. As Susan leans forward to push the canoe off, her ankles chapped with the cold, her face long and grave and bursting with expectation, it’s too much for Miriam and she has to look away to where the paddles flash in the pale depleted sunlight and the canoe cuts back and forth across the black surface like the blade of her pinking shears.
Marsha, who’s come to lend moral support, lights a second cigarette off the end of her first and flicks the still-smoldering butt into the dun grass at their feet, exhaling with a long complicated sigh. “Too cute by half,” she says.
Miriam’s on her feet—she can’t help herself—listening to her own voice skitter over the water and ricochet back again: “Don’t get too far out! Girls! Girls?”
“I heard from Seldy last night,” Marsha’s saying as Miriam eases back down on the bench. Seldy’s at Stony Brook. A junior. On scholarship and majoring in math, she’s that smart.
“And how is she?”
A pause. The canoe, far out now—halfway to the other shore and its dense dead accumulation of shoulder-high weed—makes a wobbly, long-stemmed turn and starts back, the girls paddling in unison, finally getting it. “Terrible. Awful. Worse than”—Marsha’s voice, wadded with grief and anger, chokes in her throat—“I don’t know, anything.”
“What? What is it? She isn’t—”
“She’s dropping out.”
Miriam is so surprised she can’t help repeating the phrase, twisting it with the inflection of disbelief—“She’s dropping out?” Caught up in the moment, with the girls on the lake, Susan and the others waiting their turn and the wind tugging a wedge of geese overhead, she doesn’t stop to consider that both her own sons dropped out in their time too.
“It’s that boy.”
“What boy?”
“You know, the one from high school that went to the community college for all of half a semester—Richie?”
For a moment Miriam’s confused, the name caught on her lips like an invocation—Richie, Richie?—and then suddenly she can picture him, tall and rangy in a swimsuit so tight you could see every crease and fold, the washboard stomach, hair that fell across his face like a raven�
��s wing, Richie, Richie Spano, the wiseguy, the joker, with his braying laugh and the look on his face when you caught him out that said, I am so far above this.
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish.”
And here’s the canoe, scraping at the sand that will have to be replaced again this spring or they’ll all be hip-deep in mud, and Susan’s there now, trading places with the girl in back, the power position, raising her paddle high as if it were the honed glistening spear of a warrior out for conquest.
A puff of smoke. A long mournful inhalation and Marsha won’t look her in the eye. “They’re going to get a place in the Village, she says. Live free. Do their thing.” The canoe, Miriam sees, is stuck there under the weight of the girls, stuck in the mud, and she has to restrain herself from interfering until finally Susan digs her paddle into the bottom to push them off and the canoe rides free in a shimmer of light. “Or some such crap,” Marsha says.
[I was already gone by then, trying to redeem myself in grad school, and Les was in San Francisco, managing the first Cajun-style restaurant to appear there, but I knew Richie Spano from the time Les and I rented a house in the Colony three years earlier. There was a lot of traffic in that house—friends, musicians, druggies, friends of friends, friends of druggies—and Richie drifted in from time to time. He was quick on his feet, cocky, borderline obnoxious, with a mean streak that was something sick. One night, apropos of nothing, he plucked the darts out of the board on the kitchen wall and nailed my girlfriend’s cat with one of them—which stuck there in the stripe of fur along its spine, quivering like a bandillera, until the cat vanished and bled all over the carpet in the back room and cost thirty-five dollars at the vet’s to repair, money I paid out of my own pocket because Richie Spano wasn’t about to pay anybody anything.]
Miriam is there at the window one soft mist-hung morning in the spring of a year when the canoe has been all but forgotten, chained to a rail on a grassy strand off to the far side of the beach in a mismatched tumble of upended boats, the girls on to other pursuits now, most of them boy-related. Susan is seventeen, too nervous by half over her college applications, her AP courses, the way Mr. Honer presses her to practice though she’s only third violin and Mr. Davies rides roughshod over the Thespian Club, but her room is decorated with posters of shirtless, long-haired boys posing with guitars in their hands. And there was junior prom last year when Miriam had to pull strings behind the scenes till the boy her daughter liked finally asked her, though thank god nothing more came of it beyond the gown, the flowers and home by one.
She’s sipping a cup of tea while her cigarette levitates smoke at her elbow, caught in a recollection of her own seventeen-year-old self when she first came up from Stelton for the summer to stay with her cousins in a bungalow not three city blocks from where she’s sitting now. No one would have described her as shy back then, and when she went to the beach with her cousin Molly that first afternoon and saw a group of boys sweating over a little black ball on the paddleball court, she went right up to them, not five feet away, and watched as they leapt and grimaced and slammed at the ball with all the raw frustrated adolescent power boiling up out of them until they began to falter, to hit out, to lose the rhythm of the game—and it was no secret why. It was because she was there, with her pretty dark features that everyone said were just like Rita Hayworth’s, with her nails freshly done and a white towel slung insouciantly over one shoulder, dressed in the swimsuit she’d spent the better part of an hour admiring in the full-length mirror at Genung’s before she said yes and counted out the money at the cash register. There were four boys playing and half a dozen others sprawled on the grass at the edge of the court, but the one who caught her eye—the tall one, with his slicked-back dirty blond hair, his shrinking T-shirt and the black high-top basketball shoes he wore without socks—was Sid.
She shifts in her seat, lifts the cigarette to her lips to consolidate the recollection, but the cigarette is dead. And the tea—the tea’s gone cold. She’s about to push herself up and light the gas under the kettle when a movement on the ball field catches her eye. There’s someone out there—two people, a boy and a girl—and that strikes her as odd because it’s a school day and though it’s officially spring the leaves of the trees are wound tight in the grip of their buds and it’s cold still, especially with the way the mist is pushing in off the lake. Hardly beach weather.
She’s already put up dinner—a pot roast simmering in the crock pot Les gave her for her birthday last year—and she’s been through the newspaper twice and blackened the crossword puzzle till she can’t make a thing of it. Is she bored? Lonely? In need of stimulation? She supposes so. She’s been spending an awful lot of time sitting at the window lately, talking on the telephone or just dreaming, and she’s been putting on weight too. But what are they doing out there?
In the next moment she’s in the front hall, shrugging into her faded blue parka with the mismatched mittens stuffed deep in the pockets amidst various wads of Kleenex and expired notes to herself, and then she’s out in the air, the day brisk and smelling faintly of something left too long in the refrigerator, heading down the path to where her property ends and the single-lane gravel road loops through the high chain-link gates and peters out in the beach area. She veers left, onto the grass of the outfield, and feels it wet on the worn suede moccasins she slipped on at the door. When she gets closer—when she’s halfway to the two figures bent over what looks to be a big gray-green stone protruding from the grass—she recognizes Seldy. Seldy, in bell-bottom jeans and a serape and some sort of leather cowboy hat pulled down so far it masks her eyes. And who’s that with her? Richie. Richie, looking as if he’s dressed for Halloween with his long hair, his tie-dyed shirt and the ragged cloth overcoat he might have dug out of the pile at the Salvation Army.
She’s not thinking, really—and the way she’s dressed and with her hair uncombed and no makeup on she’s not especially in the mood to see anybody at the moment—but she’s here now and that thing on the ground, she realizes, is no rock. It’s moving. And the boy—Richie—is stabbing at it with a fallen branch. In the very instant she opens her mouth to say “Hi,” startling them both, she sees what it is: a turtle. One of the big ridge-backed things that come up out of the lake to lay their eggs on the apron of sand at the edge of the ball field.
Seldy tries for a smile and only partly succeeds. Richie ignores her. “Hi,” Seldy murmurs.
“Are you up visiting?” she hears herself say, even as Richie forces the stick into the animal’s mouth and the jaws clamp down with an audible crack.
“See that?” he says. “One of these things can take your hand off if you’re not careful.”
Very softly, as if she’s afraid to raise her voice, Seldy says, “Yes,” but that’s puzzling, because Marsha didn’t breathe a word and it takes a moment for her to realize they must be staying with Richie’s parents on the other side of the lake—or not even on the lake, really, but in a development off Amazon Road. And then a scenario from a year ago presents itself, a dinner party she was giving for a new couple, the Abramsons—he’s a doctor in the city—and how Seldy, up for the weekend, had sat rigidly between her parents and barely said a word all night. Except to be negative. At one point, early on, before the Abramsons and the others arrived, Miriam had been rearranging the flowers in the big cut-glass vase she’d inherited from her mother, soliciting Marsha’s opinion, just chattering, that was all, when Seldy, her face sour and her lips drawn down, snapped at her out of nowhere. “Jesus, Miriam, it’s only the Colony, only the sticks,” she said, and her voice was like a saw cutting the house in two. “You’d think you were Mrs. Dalloway or something.”
It’s cold—raw—and she tightens the parka around her. She’s about to say something inane like “That’s nice,” when Richie jerks the branch from the turtle’s mouth and brings it down hard on the slick gleaming carapace, not once but twice. He’s lif
ting it again, lifting it high, when she steps forward and takes hold of the end of it so quickly she surprises herself. “What are you doing?” she demands, her voice gone harsh in her throat.
To his credit, he doesn’t resist, and the stick is hers now, to drop in the grass at her feet while the turtle, hissing, thrashes its head back and forth as if it can’t pinpoint the source of the threat. “Thing doesn’t deserve to live,” he says, and his eyes are unfocused, fully dilated, as if he’s dreaming on his feet. “They’re just trash anyway. They kill fish, ducks even. They—”
“No,” she says, cutting him off, “no. They belong here. They have a right to live just like everything else.” She wants to go on, wound up all of a sudden, angry out of all proportion, but he’s already turned his back on her, stalking across the grass in his high-heeled boots—purple, purple boots—and she’s left there with Seldy. Who has nothing to say. Her best friend’s daughter, a girl she’s known since she was in the cradle, and she has nothing to say. Miriam wants to invite her up to the house for tea, a bagel, a good long chat about dropping out, about fashion and respect for nature and life in the Village—freaks, they call themselves freaks—but she finds, in that moment, that she has nothing to say either.
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 106
