Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  “Wake up, mon chou,” she said into his hair. “Time for the boat ride, and then we’ll be at Nanny’s.”

  He opened his eyes and smiled. He was always happy when he woke up. Not like Ani, who took time to come back into the world. Xavier would often wake early with his father, but Ani would sleep in, shades drawn, like a teenager. On weekends she would come into Ilsa’s room, and they’d sleep the morning away together. “Nanny’s. And swimming?” His voice was hopeful.

  “Yes, swimming. Of course swimming.” She lifted him out of the car and kept him on her hip. “Nothing but swimming, if that’s what you want.”

  “Cookies?” Ani asked.

  Ilsa reached down and took her hand. “I’m sure there will be cookies. And strawberries. And blackberries.” Ilsa kissed the top of Xavier’s head, then put him down and reached for his hand, too. The three of them walked together toward the general-store area of the building.

  Inside, as always, it smelled like fish. “What’s that smell?” Ani said, nose wrinkled. “Freshly scaled and gutted fish,” Ilsa replied. “Gutted?” Ani repeated. “It means . . . cleaned,” Ilsa said. “It doesn’t smell clean,” Ani said.

  The woman behind the counter had nearly black hair pulled into a high chignon, and was wearing a navy FLIPPER’S T-shirt over slim jeans. She had on reading glasses, which she took off and put down on the counter. She was smiling at Ani. She didn’t look at all like one of Johnny’s typical women. For one thing, she wasn’t blond. Also, she had pearls in her ears, which struck Ilsa as out of place here. The woman now looked at Ilsa, still smiling, and Ilsa saw something in the woman’s eyes that she recognized. A certain sadness. Ilsa smiled back.

  Johnny, also behind the counter, with a stack of receipts and on the telephone, called this woman “babe” and asked her to pass him a calculator.

  A moment later, he hung up the phone. “Hey, Ilsa, how you been?”

  “Very well, thank you, Johnny, and you?”

  “Not bad at all. So, the restaurant’s a bit slammed with breakfast customers right now. It might be ten-thirty before Jesse can take you guys. That okay? I had to send him up to help run some food. You and those cute kids of yours want to go up and have a bite?” Ilsa found the idea of food unappealing. “Are you hungry for breakfast?” she asked the kids. Xavier didn’t reply and Ani shook her head vigorously, perhaps assuming she’d be required to eat fish, and pointed out a chocolate bar on the rack. Ilsa hesitated—it was processed, full of garbage—but then picked up two bars and said, “We’ll take these and go for a little walk.”

  “I’ll add them to your tab,” said Johnny, looking back down at his receipts.

  The woman, Myra, cleared her throat. “I could take them over,” she said.

  “Nah. Jess likes to do it. Needs to earn his keep.” Johnny didn’t look up from his addition.

  “It’s fine. We don’t mind waiting.” Ilsa led Ani and Xavier from the general store and out into the parking lot. They kept to the side of the dirt road, as close to the trees as possible.

  “Maybe we’ll see a deer,” Ilsa said. “Or a rabbit.”

  “Or a tiger!” Ani’s mouth was already smeared with chocolate.

  The only sound other than their footsteps on gravel was the electric hum of bugs and the occasional caw-caw of crows.

  But soon Ilsa heard an engine up ahead and pulled them both sideways, off the road and onto a driveway, to wait for a pickup truck to pass. The driver waved at Ilsa and Ilsa waved back because that was what you did up north, to strangers and friends alike.

  Now they stepped back out toward the road and Ilsa looked ahead. For a moment she didn’t register what she saw.

  A large shape. Fur. Moving out from the trees and onto the road.

  A wolf? It was twenty feet ahead. No, too big to be a wolf.

  Bear. She squeezed Ani and Xavier’s hands and pulled them back. “Shit,” she said aloud, then looked down at the children. “Shh.”

  “Tiger?” Ani whispered.

  “Bear. Be still.”

  If only we hadn’t decided to go for a walk, Ilsa was thinking. The bear had been crossing the road and now it stopped, as if sensing them there. Of course it senses us. It probably smells us. Shit. Ilsa wondered if they should run. But you weren’t supposed to run away from bears, were you? Big. You were supposed to make yourself look big. She swept first Xavier and then Ani up into her arms. They jostled against each other and their legs dangled. Xavier giggled. “Shh,” Ilsa said again.

  Now the bear was looking at them, paused in the middle of the road, nose forward. She lifted her head—for suddenly Ilsa felt she was a she-bear. And what if she had a cub with her? Weren’t bears supposed to be especially dangerous if protecting a cub? Ilsa squeezed her children until Ani whispered, “Ow,” and tried to pull away. Ilsa squeezed harder. Xavier dropped his chocolate bar. The bear blinked at the movement and sound.

  The bear’s and Ilsa’s eyes were now locked. Are you supposed to make eye contact with bears? Ilsa wasn’t sure but would have been unable to look away regardless, even if the bear had started to advance. She had the panicky thought that maybe she was getting what she deserved. And she found herself wishing for Fiona, a sudden, little-girl-like urge. “Did you know that whenever you were scared when you were young, you would call out for Fiona?” Helen had once told her. “I don’t believe you,” Ilsa had said. “It’s true. It’s how I knew you loved her,” Helen had replied.

  Fiona would know exactly what we should do right now.

  The bear snorted, snorted, leaned toward them—and then shook her head from side to side and continued along her path across the road.

  Ilsa stood still for another moment, listening to the crack of branches under the bear’s paws. Then she put Ani and Xavier down and said, “Let’s go back.”

  “Was it a tiger?” Ani asked.

  “Bear. Mama bear,” said Ilsa.

  Xavier: “Mama’s bear?”

  “No, just . . . just a female bear. I think. I don’t know why I think that, though.” Ilsa tended to talk to the children as though they were adults. She didn’t know how else to be with them. “I’m sorry about your chocolate bar, Xavier. We’ll get you another one.”

  Eventually she felt her heart rate return to normal. The restaurant was in sight. The woman, Myra, was out near the dock, watching Jesse ready the boat for the short journey to the island.

  “We saw a bear out on the road,” she said to Myra.

  “Oh, yes, there are a few around this year. Most of them have cubs, but there’s one lonely she-bear who seems to wander up and down the road a lot. I hope she stays out of trouble. Some of the hunters up here . . .” Myra shook her head and didn’t finish her sentence.

  “How do you know it’s a she-bear?” Ilsa asked.

  Myra shrugged. “I just know. Something about her.”

  “I thought that, too.” Ilsa looked into the woman’s eyes again. They were intelligent, blue, pale. The sadness was still there.

  Jesse motioned for them to get in the boat. Myra lifted a small life jacket, a life jacket for a child. It looked new. “Need this?”

  “No, we have our own, thanks.”

  As the boat pulled away, Ilsa scanned the tree line, looking for signs of the she-bear. She saw a moving shadow and squinted: it was Myra, walking into the woods alone.

  • • •

  Liane was sitting on the dock when Ilsa, Ani, and Xavier arrived. She put down her book and stood to wave. Ilsa was surprised to see a kayak—the kayak—tethered to the dock. Soon the boat bumped against the other side of the dock and Jesse jumped out to secure it, almost immediately starting to unload the bags. Ilsa thanked him and gave him a tip, then hoisted each child onto the dock before stepping onto it herself. She hugged Liane. It felt like a long time had passed since she had seen her sister. Ilsa hadn’t visited Toront
o that year, and Liane had only been to Rye once, at Christmas. Ilsa looked at her sister and wondered what was different about her. She was wearing an old bathing suit of Ilsa’s and it looked great, the black a perfect contrast to her pale and delicately freckled shoulders. “You look good,” Ilsa said.

  “Oh. I . . . forgot my suit,” Liane said, and Ilsa waved a hand.

  “You can have it.”

  Liane leaned down and kissed Ani’s nose, which Ani wrinkled affectionately. “Hi, Peanut,” she said, pinching one of her cheeks gently. That was when Ilsa saw it, glittering in the sun. A diamond ring. She leaned down to fiddle with a bag, then stood up and stretched her arms overhead. Liane was now kissing Xavier and tousling his curls. Glint, glint, glint, went the ring.

  “What a glorious day,” Ilsa said. “I’m so glad we finally made it, and didn’t get eaten by a bear in the process.” She started telling Liane about the bear sighting rather than asking her about the ring, which was what any normal sister would have done. That Ilsa wasn’t immediately in rapture over her sister’s apparently impending marriage to Adam, whom Ilsa disdained for a number of reasons, was no surprise. It’s just that what she had felt when she’d spotted the engagement ring on her sister’s finger was something akin to jealousy. Of whom? Adam, maybe. Or some nameless friend of Liane’s who had received this news first, had perhaps even gotten a phone call asking for advice—“What should I say?” Liane would have asked, because the decision would have been too momentous for Liane not to look for external help. But then again, who did that? Ilsa had been proposed to enough times to know there wasn’t generally enough time to make a phone call.

  Even in jail, they offer you a phone call.

  Ilsa finished the story about the bear, and Ani stood beside her and nodded, solemn. “I thought it was a tiger,” she said.

  Liane laughed. Then she turned to Ilsa, a serious expression on her face. Here it comes, she’s going to announce it. But Liane didn’t say anything about the ring. Instead, she said, “Fiona’s really not coming? What the heck happened?” And Ilsa, to her own surprise, blushed and said, “We’ll have to talk about it later,” inclining her head toward Ani and Xavier to show that it wasn’t appropriate conversation to have in front of them.

  Liane raised an eyebrow. “O-kay,” she said.

  “I’m going to go put a suit on, say hi to Mom, and get a snack for the kids. I’ll be right back.”

  Ilsa kicked off her shoes and walked up the pathway. She had her weekend bag, and one for both the kids. She also had two canvas bags of wine and food—food for Ani and Xavier, mostly: fruit, cereal, pasta. Otherwise, she had only Syrah, champagne, a baguette, and cheese. She realized she had packed the same way she did every year, assuming Fiona would have the food all organized, that they would stop on the way up and Fiona would shop for everyone the way she always did. Even as she had passed the farmers’ market it hadn’t occurred to Ilsa to stop to do anything other than have a little nap at the side of the road. She felt foolish for a moment, but she brushed the feeling away. They’d figure it out. And won’t you be surprised, Fiona, to learn that we all don’t need you as much as you think we do?

  Funny, though. Ilsa had never realized she needed Fiona at all until that day, until the bear.

  At the door, Ilsa ignored Liane’s foot bucket—“Come on, it’s fresh!” Liane shouted from the dock—and walked inside barefoot, tracking dirt and sand first on the tile in the mudroom and then on the pine floorboards in the living room and kitchen. After putting the food away, she took her weekend bag upstairs and dumped it on the bed in her room.

  Ilsa’s room was at the side of the cottage, facing the trees and the creek, with a gabled window and a bed built into the wall that was far too small for her but made her feel good to sleep in, like she was still a child and thus devoid of all responsibility. When they came up to the cottage, Ani slept in the small bed, Xavier slept in a large playpen, and she slept on an air mattress beside them. Michael had only been to the cottage a few times—he had his own family vacation property, on a small compound in Nantucket. Ilsa hated it there, mostly because of its perfection, and the distractions of televisions and telephones and screens of every description in every room. And also the way most of the people in his family seemed to avoid the water. The way they changed for dinner. The way when she dove off the boathouse his sister remarked at her bravery.

  “I’d be brave if those waters were shark-infested,” she had retorted once. But no one had laughed. “There are sharks around sometimes,” one of the sisters-in-law murmered. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.” That had been the weekend Ilsa had overheard one of Michael’s sisters say to a sister-in-law, “Do you think she’s after his money?” And the sister-in-law had wearily replied, “Oh, probably. But she won’t get any of it.” Most of Michael’s brothers were lawyers, and it was true that Ilsa had signed a prenuptial agreement. I am not after his money, she had wanted to say, wishing she had walked into the kitchen and caught those two by embarrassed surprise. I married him . . .well, I married him because he’s staid. And that was an enormous mistake. And I am the one paying for that, not him. She didn’t, though. She just asked Michael if they could go home a day early and he said, “Why, are you sick?” and she said she was, and they left.

  Now she turned in a small circle around her room. There were canvases leaning against one wall. She realized they were two that she had brought up and painted the summer before. There were small splatters on the hardwood from when she had rested them there, still wet. Paint on the floor was not something Helen cared about, Ilsa knew, but she still stood and looked down at the splatters and felt guilty. She tipped a canvas back and looked at it, then let the canvas fall back against its mate. It wasn’t great, but compared to what she had been painting lately—nothing, goddamn it—it was brilliant.

  She pulled off her T-shirt, skirt, and underwear and looked at herself in the mirror on the bureau, trying to see what Lincoln might see. Breasts that were perhaps not as pert as they used to be, but weren’t big enough to sag, with small nipples that Eric, her first husband—whom she had met at twenty-two, during a trip to Paris to see her father; he had followed her during a walk along the Seine, presented her with a bunch of flowers; she had been naïve enough to believe he didn’t do this for all the girls—had once told her were the color of black cherries. Her stomach was flat, her skin smooth and lightly tanned already.

  She raised her hands to her breasts and thought of the back of her dress, the night before. Back at home, clumsily unzipping it, she had realized that it was ruined. The delicate fabric had been pilled and mangled by the bricks on the wall of the half-finished house Lincoln had pressed her against when he had pulled her off the sidewalk during their walk home. She hadn’t noticed at the time. She hadn’t noticed anything, really, except the way it felt to be kissed.

  Eventually they had come out from between the houses and had continued to walk, stopping every few feet. Ilsa had known the heels of her shoes were beyond repair, sticky with mud, stained with dirt. She hadn’t realized about the dress yet. How easy it is to ruin things. A few houses before hers, he had kissed her one last time and asked her what the best way to contact her would be. She had given him her cell phone number. “It was delightful to meet you. I’ll see you soon,” he had said.

  Now she looked away from herself in the mirror and opened a drawer, where she rummaged for her black bandeau, remembered Liane was wearing it, and settled on a burgundy tank suit.

  She pulled suits for Ani and Xavier out of their bags, plus sunscreen, towels, and water wings for Xavier. And then she had that feeling she sometimes had, the one where she remembered for a moment what it had been like before children, when a bathing suit and towel for herself would have been enough, when she didn’t have to worry about anyone else. And she felt a hollow sadness for even thinking about those days, and she focused on how much she loved her children.
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  She heard a floorboard creak. Helen stood in the doorway, her long, blond-streaked-with-gray hair messy. “Darling.”

  “Mom! Did I wake you?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping, I was meditating.” Helen crossed the room and hugged and kissed Ilsa. “Good to see you,” she said, studying her daughter’s face the way she always did when it had been a long time between visits. Ilsa felt abruptly self-­conscious, but Helen didn’t say anything except, “You look beautiful,” which was what she always said. “I’ll get my suit on, too.” Helen headed back toward her own room, removing her rumpled sundress as she went.

  Ilsa turned away. Helen had never been the type of mother to hide her nudity, ever, and Ilsa couldn’t remember when she had started looking away from her mother’s body, and wondered when Ani would start looking away from hers.

  • • •

  Ilsa dove off the dock and swam down until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, and she still hadn’t reached the bottom. When she came up, she felt cleaner, coldly vindicated. She paddled out farther, away from the dock, and she thought about her father, Claude, and the Catholic churches he had always taken her to during her trips to Paris to see him, starting when she was a girl. The summer before, Ilsa had traveled to Paris alone with Xavier, so Claude could meet his grandson for the first time. She remembered Claude had held the little boy aloft to show off to his group of friends, all of them already wine-soaked at midafternoon. (He had done it when Ani was born, too, held her up as though she were the baby lion in that movie and said, “Here she is, my little Anaïs!” He was the only one who called her that.) That afternoon, with Xavier, the friends had all cheered: artists, musicians, poets, all of whom found themselves but not each other fascinating.

  Later that weekend, he had dragged Ilsa off to a church. “Why do you always want to confess?” she had asked. “Absolution,” he had replied. “I think it really works.” “In what way?” “If you do what the priest says, all is forgiven. So simple! And then you can just come back the next week.” And he had laughed, removed his hat, and gone into the booth while Ilsa held Xavier and wondered if her son, almost two, who was staring up, up, up at the stained-glass windows, at the golden organ pipes, at Jesus on the cross, palms bleeding, face contorted but still pious, could understand any of this. He would not be this kind of man, this she knew already. But she—she was already who she was, and in that instant she had disliked Claude for it.