Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  My father had told me I had to shake Randy’s hand, so I stuck out my hand, feeling ridiculous. Randy looked around as if he thought an enormous joke was being played on him, but he took my hand in his smaller, sweatier one, giving it the fastest shake ever.

  Still, I doubted he was finished with me. He knew my middle name. I assumed he would use the information to seal my fate, move me from the category of someone who was merely friendless to being a true goat, the butt of every classroom joke, a walking punch line. It might not seem much, my odd middle name, but I could not bear to have it dragged out into the open and mocked. It had been my mother’s gift to me and, as much as I disliked it, my distaste for it was private.

  I went to school the next day, resigned to the beginning of the end. Inside my desk, I found an eraser shaped like a giraffe and a pack of Now and Laters, lime ones. Lime Now and Laters were my favorite. I was not likely to put an unopened pack in my desk and forget about it. I looked around, wondering if there was a new kid who had gotten confused, tried to take my desk. I was careful not to let the candy be seen; it was contraband and would be seized. But the eraser—I held it up, examined it. I caught Randy looking at me, but his eyes scooted away. I was still thinking about my middle name.

  During recess, it was my habit to take a book and sit by myself. The book was usually something chosen to impress, even though I knew by then that nothing I did could impress my classmates. On that particular day, I was reading Jason and the Golden Fleece. A simplified version of the myth, but a real book, with chapters.

  “Why do you read so much?” Randy. It wasn’t the first time he had asked me that question. But it was the first time it hadn’t been a taunt, for an audience. He was alone, standing at the edge of the playground as if he didn’t dare touch the grass where I sat.

  “Well, I like it,” I said. “You can do it everywhere, so you’re never bored. In a car, at night before you go to bed. In the bathtub.”

  “Not the shower, though.”

  My temper almost flared. I hated being contradicted, topped. But then I realized that Randy was only trying to build on what I said. He was trying to have a conversation.

  “Yeah, but I don’t take showers.”

  “I do. There are five of us and only one bathroom with a tub. We each get three minutes, in and out. Even then, the hot water is kind of weak.” He was explaining to me, I think, the faint odor he carried. Randy didn’t stink, exactly. But he had a particular smell about him, sort of like fall, only not as pleasant.

  “I’d like having a lot of brothers and sisters.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Not my sisters. They’re horrible. It’s better just to have one good one. Like AJ.”

  I knew then that Randy had fallen for AJ, that the friend he really craved was that golden high school boy who had saved him. But he would settle for me. It was an oddly satisfactory friendship, conducted in secret at first. At school, we kept our distance, trying to look out for each other, but not too obviously. At the end of the day, we walked off in different directions, with Randy circling back to my house. Teensy did not approve of him. He did not receive the kind of extra attention that she had lavished on Noel and Davey. Teensy was the biggest snob in our household, which is saying a lot.

  “He lives in those town houses by the high school,” she said one day when I asked if he could stay for dinner.

  “Well, Daddy can drive him home,” I said. “If he’s here. Or AJ could. AJ could drive him home in the family car. He loves to drive.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not about the drive. It’s about—” Teensy didn’t finish the sentence.

  By fourth grade, we no longer cared if the other kids knew we were friends. We felt superior to them.

  “Don’t pay them any mind,” I told Randy as we headed out together. “They’re jealous because they know we’re having fun. More fun than anyone else has.”

  Which was to say, we were the two least supervised kids in our class. Did that make us neglected? Maybe so. But it was a benign kind of neglect. No, more than that, it was constructive. Other kids went home to inquisitive, nosy moms. Randy, like me, had no mom. We were stronger, tougher than our classmates. If we did not know what it was like to come home to a cold glass of milk, a plate of cookies—Teensy was up for the milk, not the cookies—we had learned other things. We knew every inch of open space in our neighborhood. The bike paths on which I had tried to kill Randy the first day of third grade were now battle maps to us. We named them things that revealed our complete ignorance of history—Mason-Dixon Line, Maginot Line. We ran raids, hid in bushes. The only thing we knew about war for certain was that the United States had never lost one. We were winners.

  One November afternoon, a Friday, we were lying on our bellies in a patch of overgrown grass near that culvert tunnel that led to Randy’s house, waiting for a German tank to roll by. We held sticks like rifles, pretending to “sight” through the points of the twigs. The game was to pretend to shoot any cyclist who came into view. But the first person we saw was on foot, a familiar figure, at least to me, tall and dark, moving with lanky grace.

  “Davey!” I cried, jumping up. I might have been eager to show off a little. Davey was such a natural star. Even if Randy knew nothing about Davey and his accomplishments, he would see that, be impressed that I knew such an amazing person.

  “Little . . . Lu,” Davey said with a distracted, almost sleepy tone, as if he had just awakened from a nap. I frowned at the “Little”—and the pause. Did he not know me? He and AJ had been friends for more than two years at this point. “Who’s your buddy?”

  “Randy Nairn,” I said. Davey shook hands with him, very solemn, as if greeting an important dignitary. “Nice to know you, dude.” It was like Zeus leaning out of the heavens and introducing himself to a mere mortal. Yet Randy did not seem particularly awed.

  “What are you doing around here?” I asked. “Are you coming to our house?”

  “Your house? No, I just—I just sometimes like to . . . perambulate,” Davey said. “Nice day like this. I like to wander. No practice today, tomorrow is a bye week, so I decided to kill some time before taking the bus home. You think my parents might give me a car, they have the dough, but no, no, no. That might be a distraction. You’ll get a car when you graduate, young man.” The last said in a prissy voice, only deep, so I guess he was quoting his father. “But what am I going to do with a car when I go to college, especially if I get into Stanford? I need wheels now.”

  It was hard enough to talk to Davey when he was just hanging with my brother. One-on-one, him in this odd state, it was almost impossible. But I kept trying.

  “Yeah, AJ wants a car, too.”

  “We all want so much,” Davey said. “Everybody, whatever they have, it’s never enough. You know what? Not only can you not get what you want, you can’t always get what you need. No matter how hard you try.”

  “Uh-huh.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Yeah, well—I thought I might hit the McDonald’s at the mall. See ya, Little Lu.”

  That name again. I winced. Davey went weaving down the path.

  “I see that guy all the time,” Randy said.

  “Where?”

  “Near where I live. Like, at least once a week.”

  “What would he be doing—over there?” I did not want to say: You live in those town houses where poor people live. Davey lives in Hobbit’s Glen, miles away, near the golf course, in a really nice house.

  “Buying pot, I guess.”

  “Davey doesn’t buy pot,” I said.

  “Then I guess someone gives it to him because he was H-I-G-H high just then. My sisters get high all the time. I know what it looks like.”

  “Davey’s an athlete,” I said. “And a good student. You can’t do those things if you get high.”

  “Ah, who cares? Let’s play something new. You know I have to go home by dark and that’s getting earlier and earlier. Next week is Thanksgiving alrea
dy.”

  “I know. Four whole days without school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sound like you don’t like days off.” Even this year, when I finally had a friend and a teacher who seemed to like me, I was happy to have two extra days off. I would watch the parades on Thursday morning, then watch my father and brother watch football in the afternoon. Our dinner wouldn’t be anything much—Teensy made most of the sides a day ahead, and they weren’t very good reheated. My dad roasted the smallest turkey that Butterball sold. But he couldn’t make gravy, and he never remembered to put the Parker House rolls in the oven. There was a part of me that felt as if I should take over in the kitchen, learn how to do some things. Certainly, Teensy was pushing me in that direction. But there was also a part of me that never wanted to be that person, someone I thought of, dismissively, as the girl. No cooking, no sewing, especially not after the crocheted vest debacle. Once, when I was particularly unhappy at school, my father asked if I wanted to go to a private one. It turned out he had in mind some all-female place up near Baltimore, which horrified me. I’d have rather gone to an all-boy school. And not because I disliked females. I’m not one of those women. But if you weren’t competing with boys, it seemed to me, the bar had been lowered. I ran against boys, played their games on their terms, ceded no ground to them in schoolwork. I don’t think it’s an accident that I married the smartest person I’ve ever known, the only person who was unequivocally smarter than I am. Except for my father, of course. My father and AJ.

  “We don’t really do Thanksgiving at my house,” Randy said. “My dad almost always has to work, and my sisters just want to eat Chef Boyardee out of the can.”

  “Maybe you could come to our house,” I said. “I can ask.”

  I think he had been hinting for just this invitation, but he kept his reaction simple: “Okay, you ask, and if your dad says okay, I’ll ask my dad. It would be better if your dad called my dad, though. I don’t think my dad can say no to your dad.”

  The sun was down, the light fading rapidly. It was time for us to part, but it was hard to say good-bye for some reason. The days were growing shorter, and our time outside would be coming to an end soon. Where would we go, as the days grew dark and cold? It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that we felt a little like Adam and Eve, about to be thrust out of Eden.

  Maybe Randy felt this, too, judging by what he said next.

  “Should we kiss?” Randy asked me.

  The question threw me.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m just not—a kisser. I’m not a girl who goes around kissing.”

  “Have you tried it?”

  “Have you?”

  “No, but my sisters sure do seem to like it. Their boyfriends come over, after dinner, when my dad has left for work. I think that’s all they do. I stay in my room. If I didn’t stay in my room, one of them would take it and do her kissing in there and I don’t want anyone kissing in my bed. Except me, I guess. They’re mad that they have to share a room; they think I should sleep with my dad if there are only three bedrooms. It’s not my fault I’m the only boy. Amanda, that’s the next one up—she tells me I wasn’t planned, that I’m not supposed to even be here and that’s why our mom left. She said I was the last straw. What does that even mean?”

  “Your mom left?” I knew moms died. I had no idea they left.

  “Yeah. She got a job in Ohio or something. Don’t forget to ask your dad about Thanksgiving, okay?”

  He insisted on walking me back to my street, as far as the communal mailboxes. That was another Columbia concept—the mail didn’t come to your house, it was delivered to a locked compartment in a large box that served the entire cul-de-sac. This was supposed to foster community spirit. In my house, it meant that AJ or I had to get the mail because the last thing my father wanted at the end of a long day of serving the community was to talk to actual members of the community.

  I watched Randy walk away. He walked like a grown-up, an old one, his narrow shoulders rounded, his feet shuffling like the characters in the animated Peanuts cartoons. He walked as if he hoped he never got to where he was going. Why had he brought that thing up about kissing? Was it because of what the other kids said, planting the idea in his head that we should be kissing? I wanted none of that. Now I was going to have to watch him all the time, make sure he didn’t try it on the sly. Kissing ruined everything.

  FEBRUARY 11

  Lu looks at her plate. She has seen this plate of food many times. It is the meal inevitably served at such luncheons, luncheons that make up too much of her life. There is a salad with iceberg lettuce, two slices of cucumber, edges crimped, carrot shavings, and one—always one—cherry tomato. The salad is always served with a choice of ranch or raspberry vinaigrette dressing, both of which she declines. Always. The salad will be followed by string beans and one’s choice of beef, salmon, or chicken. Lu has learned over the years that the salmon, counterintuitively, is always the safest choice. Dessert, which looks fantastic—a fudgy brownie with ice cream on top—is served at the exact moment she is called to the podium. She knows the harried waitstaff will have cleared her brownie before she returns.

  Today’s luncheon is for a professional women’s group in Howard County and Lu is the keynote speaker. More insultingly, she is the fill-in speaker. They wanted the state’s attorney of Baltimore City. She is younger, an African American woman whose election last fall was considered big news, overshadowing Lu’s election as the first female state’s attorney in the history of Howard County. (Baltimore has not only had a female state’s attorney before, but she was African American, too, so the only notable thing about the new attorney’s election was that she defeated a well-financed incumbent. But Lu did that, too.) Now, listening to her introduction, she has a sinking feeling that it may not have been updated, that the woman at the lectern might be describing the originally scheduled speaker. No, wait, there it is, the telltale phrase—

  “And, not incidentally, the daughter of one of the most beloved men in Howard County, the former state’s attorney Andrew J. Brant.”

  Former state’s attorney. Why did he stop there? Strangely, Lu has never reopened that topic with her father, not since 1986 when he stepped down, amid speculation that he would run for Congress. Yet he never did. He said, at the time, that he felt he was out of step with the county and the country. Reagan was still president. Lu suspects her father’s real problem is that he preferred the Senate to the Congress; her father’s temperament was better suited to that more sedate, formal body. But Barbara Mikulski was elected to the Senate that year and it was believed it would be a long time before there would be a vacancy in the Maryland seats. The belief was true. Sarbanes, elected in ’76, didn’t leave until the 2007; Mikulski is still in office, although speculation is rife that she might announce this is her last term. Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn’t seem to like you that much.

  In front of an audience such as this, she can go on autopilot. Lu never prepares her speeches ahead of time but works from a menu of discrete topics, which she can arrange in endless forms depending on her audience. This group wants heartwarming empowerment, so she talks about work-life balance, the challenges of being a woman in public office, especially a single parent. That went well, she thinks, as she tries to rush out without seeming to rush out. (Sure enough, her brownie was gone. So it goes.)

  But as she moves through the kind, smiling, congratulatory women, a younger one blocks her way. Lu, still on autopilot, extends her hand, but the woman, whose suit looks like a cheap knockoff of the rag & bone suit that Lu is wearing, keeps her arms crossed on her chest, a bad sign unless she’s chilly—and it’s not cold in this room. Overheated if anything.

  “That’s a bit disingenuous, isn’t it? Describin
g yourself as a single mother.”

  “I don’t know what else you would call me,” Lu says. “I am a single mother. My husband died.”

  She chooses to speak bluntly as a rebuke to the young woman’s borderline rudeness. In another situation, she might have used the more genteel “widow” or said that Gabe had “passed away.”

  “And left you millions, right? So you can afford to send your children to private schools and you have help.”

  “My husband’s money was left primarily in trust for our children and I administer those trusts. I live with my father and the housekeeper who cared for me when I was young. In the village of Wilde Lake, in my childhood home. I have a babysitter, a college student, who takes my children to school and picks them up in the afternoon because I work at least twelve hours a day. It’s not a particularly high-flying lifestyle.”

  “But you don’t have to work, right? So are we returning to that model in which public service is only for those people who don’t need the salary? What am I supposed to take away from your story? I’m thirty, I have a three-year-old and so much college debt that I can’t ever see getting out from under. Your earrings probably cost more than I make in a week.”

  Alas, they did, although they’re not showy in that way. They are vintage rose gold, from a flash-shopping site. On Saturday nights, Lu likes to have an extra glass of wine and shop the no-return sales on certain websites for the thrill of it. Yes, she’s crazy that way. Buzzed shopping is her biggest vice. Second biggest.

  “They’re used,” Lu says. “And I bought them at 50 percent off. I’m sorry if my personal experience doesn’t speak to you. But I think the point is that women, whatever their challenges, benefit from networking and support. I’m so sorry—I really do have to go. Thank you for having me.”