Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “He can think what he likes,” AJ said. “But I was one of only sixty-six kids chosen to sing in the chorus. I think that’s a pretty big honor.”

  The number sixty-six was not arbitrary. Ground for Columbia had been broken in 1966. A year later, the city had dedicated the People Tree, a gleaming metal statue of sixty-six intertwined human figures. Columbia’s official symbol, it had been erected near the shore of Lake Kittamaqundi. So when the celebration was planned, it was decided to have a townwide chorus of sixty-six teenagers. AJ wasn’t the least bit surprised to be one of them. AJ was never surprised to be picked for anything. Noel and Ariel made the cut, too, and Ariel even had a dance later in the program.

  AJ assumed he would be given the big vocal solo. But that went to a boy not in their crowd, a tall, very dark-skinned freshman from Oakland Mills.

  Davey.

  Looking at Davey, one might have expected a baritone voice, a Paul Robeson kind of voice singing “Old Man River.” But perhaps that was just our unacknowledged bigotry, linking tone to color, as if all dark-skinned men were obligated to produce deep, dark notes. As it happened, when Davey showed up at the audition with nothing prepared, the chorus master suggested “Old Man River.” Davey didn’t know it. After a quick conference with the piano player, he decided to sing a Beatles song, “If I Fell.” AJ told me that his voice stunned everyone. He had a glorious tenor, not a baritone, and there was a simplicity to his phrasing that made familiar songs sound new again. He probably could have sung opera if he wanted to. Davey didn’t want to sing opera. He didn’t even want to be in the birthday concert. A teacher had tricked him into going to the audition, claimed the tryout was required for chorus, which he took only because it was an easy “A” for him. Davey played football and needed to keep his grades up, because his parents had said they would take him off the team if he didn’t maintain an A average. His parents’ standards were much higher than the school’s, which required only passing grades from its athletes. So Davey stood next to the piano, a reluctant star, and sang a Beatles song, assuming he wouldn’t be picked.

  But if Davey did not understand how magical his voice was, AJ did. So did Noel. They sized him up—a freshman, like them, only a good six inches taller than AJ. Black. Coal black, midnight black. He was obviously going to be the soloist, taking the spot that AJ had assumed would be his. AJ, fiercely proud, probably decided that the only way to prove he couldn’t care less was to befriend Davey.

  He brought Davey home that very night. Teensy fell all over herself, offering him things to eat and drink. She asked him to stay for dinner. Our father arrived home and also took an interest in Davey, peppering him with far more questions than he had ever asked of anyone else AJ had brought home—Noel, Bash, Ariel. He was excited, I think, that his son had a black friend. That sounds horrible, but in the context of 1977, it was—well, less so. Howard County was, overall, very white. Less than 15 percent of the population was nonwhite at the time; not quite 12 percent was African American. The numbers were different in Columbia proper, but not that different. People who grew up in Columbia during the 1970s remember it as an idyllic, postracial bubble. I don’t.

  “Do you want to sing professionally?” our father asked Davey over dinner, a quiche Lorraine. (“But I can make you something else,” Teensy said, “if you don’t like it.” She never said that to me. Davey said it was all right, his mother made quiche all the time.)

  “No, sir,” Davey said. “I like to sing, but I’m hoping that I can use football to get a scholarship to Stanford. I want to be a doctor.”

  “How ambitious,” my father said.

  “I guess so,” Davey said. “My dad’s a doctor. A surgeon at Hopkins. Oncology.”

  My father coughed, gulped some wine. He seemed embarrassed. I wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t the kind of lawyer who sued doctors for malpractice. He gulped more wine, had another coughing fit.

  “And you’re at Oakland Mills?”

  “Yes, sir. But I’d like to switch to Wilde Lake. Is it true that you can go at your own pace, do courses—I’m not sure what you call it. Independently? I’d like to take extra science and math, and there’s no way to do that at my school. But I’ve got to take calculus in high school and at the rate I’m going, I’ll only make it through trig and analyt because I didn’t take Algebra two in middle school. My family moved to Columbia after I finished seventh grade and they didn’t realize that the math I took in the city was the same as Algebra I. They basically put me back a year in some courses and by the time we figured it out, it was too late to change.”

  “I believe there are fewer independent courses than there once were,” my father said. “Most young people were not well suited to what’s called open space education. I remember when the school first opened, the promise was that students could go at their own pace. Now it’s more along the lines of—go at your own pace, but there is a minimum speed limit.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  “Math and science don’t have as many self-directed classes,” AJ put in. “But if you’re supersmart, they make allowances. There are kids who come down from the middle school to take math because they’re so advanced. Dad, can’t you do something?”

  “AJ, it would be unseemly for the state’s attorney to intervene in school district policy. However—Davey, have your parents call me. I can certainly give them advice about how to deal with county bureaucracy.”

  Davey became a fixture in our house, the twosome of AJ and Noel easing seamlessly into a threesome. The other friends—Bash, Lynne, Ariel—were more like satellites. AJ, Noel, and Davey were the triumvirate, their group’s ruling power. It made sense for Davey to come home with AJ after rehearsals, as they could walk to our house from Merriweather Post Pavilion. The others in AJ’s group of freshman superstars approved of him, welcomed him. Bash liked having a guy who wanted to shoot hoops in our driveway. Ariel and Lynne flirted with him, although he didn’t flirt back. Davey’s parents didn’t want him to have a steady girlfriend.

  The addition of Davey made their group even more outstanding. He was just so darn noticeable, taller and darker and, maybe, handsomer than the rest. (It’s hard to know if one’s brother is handsome, especially at age seven. But even Noel’s beauty—there’s no other word for it—was eclipsed by Davey’s good looks.) AJ was the undisputed leader within the group, but Davey was its beacon, drawing attention to them. It was odd when that Life magazine article about Wilde Lake High School came out later that year and Davey wasn’t in the photo. We had already become accustomed to looking for him. Have you ever tailgated at a big football game? In order to be found in the crowds, some people plant distinctive flags, then say things like: “Find us at the Flying Crawfish.” The College Park crowd that Gabe knew flew Testudo, the fighting Terrapin mascot of the University of Maryland. Anyway, Davey was like that. Spot him and you would find the rest.

  Merriweather Post Pavilion had been endowed by the cereal heiress of the same name and was intended to be the home of a serious symphony. But by Columbia’s tenth year, the Frank Gehry–designed amphitheater was a venue for pop concerts, from Jimi Hendrix to Frank Sinatra. You could sit in seats under the shell or bring a picnic basket and camp out on the surrounding lawn. The night of the birthday concert, my father and I had seats. I was disappointed, but my father was never going to be the picnic-blanket type of father. Even on a warm June night, he insisted on wearing his work clothes, or part of them: seersucker pants, a long-sleeved white shirt, a bow tie, and a hat. At seven, I was still too young to be horrified by a relative’s clothing choices. My disastrous fling with fashion would not be for another two years. And I was not embarrassed by my father, not yet. I did not see that he was older than most parents, or that he, like me, had few real friends. Many collegial acquaintances, but no real friends. I did not realize how much of a loner he was, in contrast to AJ. Even then, I sometimes wondered if my brother courted Davey because his talents in music and sports exceeded AJ’s. One of the few mean thing
s I ever heard AJ say about anyone, back then, was when Davey was offered a free ride to Stanford three years later: “Well, he plays football. I’d get a lot of scholarship offers, too, if I played football instead of soccer.”

  Noel had given him a look. “Not to mention that he’s black, right?”

  “There’s not a prejudiced bone in my body,” AJ said.

  “Of course there isn’t.”

  But that was later. That night, the chorus, sixty-six strong, sang stirring anthems of patriotism and community. One of them, oddly, was the title song from the musical Milk and Honey, rewritten to fit the occasion and scrubbed of its Israel-specific lyrics. Davey’s voice soared over the rest: This lovely land is mine. This lovely land is mine. This lovely land is mine. I officially abandoned my crush on Noel and fixed my affections on Davey. As the song reached its climax, a scrim depicting the Tree of Life fell and somehow it seemed as if the chorus had become a living, breathing Tree of Life.

  My father, in his seat next to me, allowed himself a quiet snort, which he masked with his handkerchief as if it were a sneeze.

  “Wasn’t that great? Didn’t you love it?” I asked my father.

  “I can’t help thinking of another tree of people, another song,” he said. “A much darker song, but a truer one, called ‘Strange Fruit.’ I guess I’m just an old grouch.” My father squeezed my shoulder. “Do you want to stop at the 7-Eleven for a Slurpee?”

  I did.

  Sometime over the summer, it was worked out that Davey would attend Wilde Lake. I never knew the circumstances. I think I just assumed AJ made it happen. He had that kind of power. He had decreed that they were to be a group of six now, and so they were. (The truth was more prosaic. Davey’s parents had found a large house in Hobbit’s Glen, much more to their taste, and although it was zoned for Centennial High School, the new school was so oversubscribed that they had no trouble getting Davey into Wilde Lake—at Davey’s insistence.) The six did everything as a group. When Lynne and Bash started pairing off, AJ didn’t approve—not because he was prudish about sex, but because he thought it bad for the group. Luckily, Lynne and Bash didn’t really care that much about being boyfriend and girlfriend. They just liked to have sex.

  I saw them once, that summer between their freshman and sophomore year of high school. Our father had to go out of town for an annual meeting, something to do with being a state’s attorney. Teensy had a wedding in her family and my father decided that AJ, although only fifteen, was old enough to be in charge for a night. No parties, my father said. Of course, AJ said. And had a party. Bash found a burnout college kid who was happy to buy them beer and liquor at the Village Green. They weren’t really drinkers, but it was almost obligatory to have booze at a parent-free party. AJ put me in my father’s bed with a pound of peanut M&Ms and the remote control for the small black-and-white TV on top of what our father called a chifforobe. He told me that I could do whatever I wanted, but that I must stay in my father’s room except to visit the bathroom that connected it to my room. I wasn’t sure what they were doing that was so secretive. There was music and conversation, that sweet burning smell I had noticed before. I watched a horror film, one in which Leave It to Beaver’s dad ended up underground with the Mole People. I wanted to go to the bathroom, but what if the Mole People were under my father’s high, old-fashioned bed? If I climbed down from the bed, they would reach out and grab my ankles and drag me down to that terrible place, where I would be enslaved. But I had consumed almost a gallon of orange soda. There was no way I could make it through the night. I calculated that if I leaped from the bed, I might land out of arm’s reach of the Mole person. I jumped, landing on my knees, then made my way to the bathroom without incident. The house was quiet. I assumed everyone had gone home. I decided my own room would be a cozier place to sleep even if it didn’t have a television, so I cracked the door, checking carefully for any sign of Mole People.

  And then I saw them.

  Saw Bash, who was completely naked, which made an impression on me. My father was modest. I had never seen him or even AJ without clothes. I had never seen a man naked, not even his buttocks. Bash was so broad that I couldn’t see anything of Lynne’s body except her face over his shoulder. Her face looked very serious. Stern, a mean teacher face. She bit her lip, whispered in his ear. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” Yet she looked as if it were hurting, as if she yearned for him to stop. Bash made no noise at all. He barely seemed to be breathing. He tried to kiss her, but Lynne twisted her face to the side. “No, no. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Dammit. You—Let me show you—” She made some adjustment in the dark. Whatever they were doing—and I knew, yet I didn’t know—she was better at it, I could tell. She had done it before and Bash hadn’t. She was like AJ, trying to teach me basketball. I remember the others teasing Lynne about a student teacher who had given her rides home from cheerleader practice and it began to make sense. I was at that age where so much begins making sense, where stray facts and memories lingered in some waiting room of the brain until context came and took them by the hand.

  Lynne hissed: “Yes. Yes. That’s it. You can do it, Bash. You can do it.”

  “I am doing it,” he said in wonder. He rose up. He looked like a merman, swimming along the tops of the waves.

  I backed away, not even trying to close the door. I got into my father’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. Now I really couldn’t sleep. So that was sex. I knew, but I didn’t know. My father had done that with my mother. Had Teensy done it? But she didn’t have kids, so, no. Grown-ups everywhere did that thing. Did this make Lynne and Bash grown-ups? Lynne wasn’t much taller than I was. She was the cheerleader who was always at the top of the pyramid. But she had looked and sounded like a woman. Whereas Bash had a grown-up man’s body and a boy’s face. Would they get married? Would I get to go to the wedding? Would I be their flower girl? I didn’t want to be a flower girl. Or maybe I did.

  Teensy came over on Sunday afternoon to check on us. The house was immaculate by then, every trace of the party swept away. It was too clean and Teensy stalked around, smelling a rat. But all she found was my mess—the empty bag of peanut M&Ms, the jug of soda. Plus, I had a full-on stomachache that I couldn’t conceal. I confessed to everything—the bad food, the horror movies, sleeping in my father’s bed. I said AJ had no idea what I was up to, that he had stayed in, as instructed, listening to records and watching television.

  “What did he have for dinner?” Teensy asked.

  I was a lawyer’s daughter. I saw how she was trying to box me in.

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Did he offer to fix you anything? There were hot dogs and some frozen pizzas.”

  “He probably did, but I wasn’t hungry.”

  “After eating a pound of candy? I guess not, you fool.” She sat on my bed, felt my forehead. Teensy didn’t really believe in illness. Absent a fever or vomit, a child was not allowed to stay in bed on Teensy’s watch. But I must have looked ragged that day because she took pity on me, left me in my own bed, even brought in the little b&w television from her room, the one that we watched on a tray on those rare occasions we were allowed to stay home from school.

  I dozed off and on in front of the television. I always did. My father did that, too. Still does. He’d rather fall asleep in his chair, the television droning as he reads, than go to bed. It was a Sunday, so a movie was on, but it was just adults talking. People whispered, told secrets. With my eyes closed, I saw Bash and Lynne again. Saw Bash, the freckled merman, riding the waves, his head thrown back as if he were about to sing. Milk and honey, milk and honey, milk and honey.

  “Teensy,” I croaked from my bed. “Could I have some graham crackers?”

  “No, but you can have some saltines and flat Coca-Cola.” Teensy believed those two things to be medicinal.

  I sat up in bed, licking the salt from the Premium saltines. I had seen two people having sex. It was big news, enormous news, but I had n
o one to tell. Teensy would want to know about the party, and I owed it to AJ not to reveal that. A pound of M&Ms buys a steadfast silence. It didn’t occur to me that the others—AJ, Noel, Ariel, Davey—had not seen what I saw, might not know what I know. I had no real friends at school, not the kind that I could share such secrets with. Strangely, the person I wanted to tell was my father. I wondered if he knew that people did it when they weren’t trying to have a baby because I’m pretty sure he had told me that was the only reason to have sex. But maybe Lynne and Bash wanted to have a baby. Then again, they couldn’t drive yet and I absolutely knew you had to have a driver’s license before you had a baby. My dad had sex twice, I thought, once for AJ and once for me. I bet he was glad he didn’t have to have it anymore. It looked messy and painful.

  I was a spy. I was every spy that ever was. I was Velma on Scooby-Doo. I was Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Trixie Belden, the Hardy Boys. I was Harriet the Spy, although I had not met her yet, but I would, soon enough. They were waiting for me, another member of their clan of spies, snoops, and truth tellers. I opened drawers, searched medicine cabinets and pigeonholes, pressed my ear to walls, looked through keyholes. I thought I knew everything. I thought I was entitled to know everything, that the world was conspiring to keep me in the dark.

  JANUARY 13

  “Do you like this? Do you?”

  Lu tries to make clear exactly how she feels about the fingers digging into her scalp, pulling her hair, but the sensation keeps changing, the pain keeps moving. She is on her stomach and the natural instinct should be to crawl away, futile as that might be, but strong hands grab her waist and flip her, so now she is facing him as he enters her and she gasps—she’s lying on a sisal rug, rough on bare flesh under any circumstances.

  Then she sees Bash’s face and she starts to laugh. After all these years, she can’t quite get over the fact that he looks like Huckleberry Finn, with his freckles and chipped tooth and never-quite-combed hair.