Before You Know Kindness

by Chris Bohjalian

  "I'll bet you want us to meet some more people, don't you, Grandmother?" Charlotte said, her words giddy and playful. Given the rare and uncharacteristic good cheer that filled the child's voice, her eyes were not as wide as Nan would have expected. But she was so pleased to see Charlotte in such fine spirits that she didn't think anything of it, and she concluded that if she weren't already so anxious to get home she actually might have chosen this moment to show off her granddaughters some more.

  "I always want you to meet people," she answered. "And you were both so charming earlier. But we're through for tonight. It's late."

  "It sure is," Willow agreed, nodding, and then she giggled as if she found something funny in the fact it was after nine.

  "Let's find your parents--"

  "There's Mom," Willow said, the words a chipper little cry, and she pointed at Sara as her mother was lifting Patrick from his canvas chair, the baby's head swaying on his shoulders as if it were a poorly attached pumpkin on a scarecrow. John was beside her, gathering into his arms the diaper bag with its bottles and lotions and wipes.

  Nan nodded and felt a surge of relief at the idea that--almost miraculously--everybody was preparing to go home at exactly the same moment, and that moment was now: Her granddaughters had returned as happy as could be from the bonfire, and her daughter-in-law and her son were collecting little Patrick and his accessories. Any minute now she would spy Catherine and Spencer, and they all would be off.

  "I don't see my mom," Charlotte said, craning her neck.

  "I saw her a few minutes ago," Nan said. "She was talking to Gary Winslow."

  "Where was Dad?"

  "He's around, too."

  "Was he talking to Gary?"

  "I don't recall who he was talking to, Charlotte. Now, do you have your shoes? Where are your shoes?" She had happened to look down and saw that Charlotte's feet were bare.

  "Oh, yeah. My sneak-sneaks."

  "Your what?"

  "My--oh, don't worry, Grandmother, I know right where they are," she said, and suddenly she and Willow were almost doubled over in laughter.

  "Well, I don't see what's funny about misplacing your sneakers. Go get them so we can go home. Shoo, now!"

  "They're . . . they're . . ."

  "They're down by the golf course, I suppose? At the bonfire?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Okay. Willow, why don't you go help your parents with Patrick? Tell them Charlotte and I are just getting her sneakers."

  "But call them sneak-sneaks!" Charlotte called after her cousin, and once again the children succumbed to a burst of hilarity at the word.

  She took Charlotte's hand and led the girl through the crowd. Her granddaughter was unusually pliant, and Nan attributed this to the lateness of the hour and the idea that the child had apparently had a nice time with the teenagers. The older children had not let her down: They'd taken good care of her granddaughters.

  There were people on the terrace and the soft grass surrounding the practice green, and the tiki torches were sending small plumes of jet black smoke into the sky. Here she could hear the music from the clubroom, something slightly jazzy, as well as the rock music from the bonfire down the hill. As she and Charlotte approached the teenagers she thought she smelled something sweet and herbal and unfamiliar, and she wondered if the teenagers had thrown pinecones or cloves into the blaze to give it this scent.

  "They're over by those cartons," Charlotte said, as they stood in the shadows at a short distance. "I see them."

  "Are those beer cartons?"

  "Oh, no! Soda. They're the soda cartons."

  She nodded, though she didn't believe for a minute those cartons had ever held anything but beer. Still, she wasn't upset: Certainly John and Catherine had snuck a few surreptitious beers when they had been teenagers, and there were worse places for these teens to drink a beer or two than a bonfire no more than 150 yards from their parents. Generally, these were pretty wholesome kids. She watched some of the girls and boys dance, while others sat in the grass in small groups of three and four. She guessed there were twenty or twenty-five teenagers here. None of them seemed to pay Charlotte much attention as she rounded up her sneakers, and Nan was glad: She didn't want to delay their departure any longer than necessary. She wanted to return to the clubroom with Charlotte, find Catherine and Spencer, and then head home. Tomorrow was Sunday, and she wanted everyone to get plenty of sleep tonight so they could spend a healthy chunk of the next day swimming at Echo Lake, before returning to the club for some late-afternoon tennis. Activity would be especially important if, as discussed, they all went to Gerta's Edelweiss Garden for dinner.

  "Got my sneak-sneaks," Charlotte cooed, and she held them high in the air, one in each hand, by their laces.

  "Come on, then."

  "I'm come-on-ing."

  It took them a tad longer to climb back up the hill than Nan would have liked because Charlotte seemed to be dawdling--one moment she was lifting her legs in slow motion as if they were cranes and staring down at her knees in rapt fascination, and the next she was stopping still in her tracks to gaze at her fingers--but finally she managed to herd her granddaughter back to the terrace. She sighed, but her relief was short-lived because there she saw Catherine and Gary at the very edge of the terrace. They were not exactly alone, but they were not exactly a part of the festivities, either. They were buffered from the rest of the crowd by the massive stone barbecue Gary's own grandfather had paid to have built after some other club member had used the sand dune on nearby eighteen for a clambake. The barbecue was at least seven feet tall and that many feet wide, the individual stones the size of lamp shades and basketballs. At first Nan couldn't imagine why Catherine and Gary had felt the need to carry on their conversation behind the barbecue, but then almost instantly she could. She saw Gary's free hand, the one not holding his glass, reach behind Catherine's head, brushing her daughter's ponytail with his fingers and (surely she had not seen this part correctly) stroking briefly the back of her neck. With the reflexes of a mother bear protecting both a cub and a grand-cub, in one smooth motion Nan moved herself between Charlotte and Catherine so the girl couldn't see her mother and guided the child forward onto the cold slate of the patio. Then she looked back over her shoulder and called out in a voice that she was confident sounded completely normal, "Catherine, Charlotte and I are rounding up Spencer and heading home." She thought it was important now to remind Catherine that she had both a daughter and a husband and they both were present at the club.

  She listened for a moment, but over the sounds of the music and the conversation and the clinking of ice against glass she heard nothing from either Catherine or Gary.

  "Did you see Mom?" Charlotte asked her, and the girl suddenly looked young and small to Nan, almost tiny.

  "Yes, dear," she said. "Here she comes now." From behind the barbecue they watched Catherine emerge. She was alone, she looked vaguely uncomfortable, and Nan noticed that the glass in her hands was empty. A moment later Nan saw Gary strolling down the hill toward the bonfire, away from the cocktail party, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. If she hadn't known that he, too, had been behind that massive wall of stones, she would have presumed that he'd materialized out of thin air.

  THEY WERE DRIVING HOME in a caravan of two cars, the minivan that Catherine and Spencer had rented, followed by John and Sara's navy blue Volvo. Nan was riding with John and Sara, sharing the backseat with baby Patrick, while the girls went ahead in the rental. Nan didn't mind sharing the backseat with the baby, but he was a tad fussy right now because he smelled like a Dumpster, and it was taking a lot of work to keep him from howling. Still, if she wished she were in the other car it was primarily because she would have liked to have watched her daughter and son-in-law up close to see if there was any tension between them. When they were assembling in the parking lot of the club a few minutes ago, Spencer had wondered aloud whether they'd arrive home and actually witness deer racing away from the yard when t
heir headlights washed over the garden, and with a real edge in her voice Catherine had asked him to let go of the deer--Get over it, she had said--and to please move on.

  Nevertheless, her distance now from Catherine and Spencer proved calming. Reassuring. By the time they pulled into her driveway, she told herself that she hadn't witnessed anything inappropriate when she and Charlotte had been returning to the clubhouse from the bonfire. She had seen Catherine talking to a teenager at a cocktail party. Maybe Gary had been swatting at a mosquito near Catherine's ear or pulling a bug from her hair. There were a million innocent reasons why the two of them might have been standing behind a barbecue rather than, say, by the glass doors or the tiki torches or--along with almost all of the other adults who were outside at that moment--near the long tables with the finger foods and the booze. For all she knew, Gary was regaling Catherine with stories about how her daughter had been spending her days at the club. What a dolphin the child had become in the pool. How nicely she dove.

  The cars arrived back home together, and while John and Sara took the baby upstairs she watched her granddaughters and Catherine and Spencer climb from their vehicle. She noticed that the two girls still seemed to be giggling, and they were strolling to the edge of the garden with Spencer. Catherine walked past her to the front door of the house, moving, Nan observed, with her head down as if she were an embarrassed teenager. She recalled the time Catherine had been fifteen years old, and she and some summer fling had managed to fog up the windows in Catherine's bedroom upstairs. It had been a chilly, rainy August afternoon and they had closed the windows against the cold. When Nan had gone upstairs to tell the young man it was time to go home, she discovered that he and Catherine had been petting with such vigor that the glass panes looked like a shower stall. Catherine had the same guilty expression on her face now.

  After she heard the screen door swing shut, she joined Spencer and the girls at the perimeter of the garden. Even in the moonlight, they couldn't see much. They could distinguish the corn plants that Spencer had returned to their upright positions, gently showering the roots with clay and dirt, and they could make out the potato hills. They could see the twine that had been stretched like tightropes over the rows of carrots and the stakes that were nearest them. But that was about it.

  Spencer sighed so loudly that Nan and the girls heard him, and then mumbled something about a short walk.

  "Dad is really bummed out, isn't he?" Charlotte said, once he had started off into the night.

  "Yes, he is," Nan said. "But he'll get over it." She hadn't meant to sound unsympathetic, but she could tell by the way her granddaughter was looking at her--her lower lip drooping slightly, her eyebrows raised into a dome--that she had. All she had meant to suggest was that, like most men, her father was overreacting. Men made a big deal about pain and a big deal about disappointment. Then they got over both. At least they did if they had any character, and she knew Spencer certainly had some. He had a temper and that annoying eccentricity about meat, but otherwise he was pretty solid.

  "Don't stay out here too long, girls," she continued after a moment, when neither Charlotte nor Willow said anything. Charlotte had turned away from her, and--not unlike her father a moment ago--was staring into the dark. It dawned on Nan suddenly that her two children and their spouses were so focused on other things that they had all gone into the house or into the fields without a single word to their daughters: not a word about the evening, not a word about getting ready for bed. John and Sara had raced inside with Patrick, Catherine had gone inside with her tail between her legs, guilty over . . . Nan didn't know what, but guilty over a desire, a word, perhaps even an act. (No, it hadn't gone that far, Nan quickly reassured herself.) And Spencer had gone for a walk, unable to think about anything but his distress over this ridiculous garden.

  She felt a slight rush of annoyance at all four of them, both for their dereliction of parental duty and for taking her for granted. They were all so absorbed in their own lives that either they hadn't thought for a moment of their daughters or they had presumed that Grandmother would take care of the pair. Get their teeth brushed, their hair combed. Get them into their nightgowns. Settle them down with their books.

  Did they--John and Sara, Catherine and Spencer--have any idea how complicated it was to settle the two girls down at the end of the day? Of course they didn't. Last night, everyone's first together in the country, the girls had stayed up till eleven thirty with their parents, showing them what they had learned about bridge, telling them about their nature hikes, and regaling them with their stories of their days at the club. The children (and, Nan reminded herself, they were children) had collapsed into their beds, exhausted. It wasn't usually that easy.

  She paused with her hands on her hips and stared at the house. She was torn between her belief that these girls needed a grown-up right now and her sense that her own two children were taking advantage of her--as, in truth, they did for weeks at a time with the Seton New England Boot Camp. She loved her grandchildren, she loved them very much. But she was a glorified babysitter, that's what she was.

  She could hear her breath steam from her nose, and she shook her head. Then, convinced that any second she would stop herself and turn around and herd the children inside, she started toward the front door. She did not stop herself, however, not this time. She went through the front hall and past the living room, up the stairs--pausing briefly on the second-floor landing where she heard John and Sara down the hall whispering as they arranged Patrick's crib and started preparing the baby for bed, saw the shut bathroom door and understood that Catherine was inside there running a bath--and then to her own sanctum sanctorum on the third floor. She sat on her bed with her hands on the edge of the mattress, vexed by her children. When she would recall this moment in the coming days, she would wonder if that sensation of pique had in actuality been apprehension.

  THE TWO GIRLS collapsed into grass already damp with evening dew and gazed up at the stars.

  "We don't have stars like this in New York, you know," Charlotte said.

  "I do know," Willow said. "How are you?"

  "What do you mean, how am I?"

  "You know."

  "If I knew, why would I ask?"

  "I'm still pretty buzzed. I know that. But the giggles are gone."

  "Personally, I think you're more drunk than buzzed. There's a difference."

  "What about you?"

  "Mellow. Mellow stoned."

  "How does your throat feel?"

  "My throat feels fine."

  "Not sore?"

  "It was at first. But then the buzz began and it went away. Poof."

  "I still can't believe you did that."

  "I can't believe we did that," Charlotte said, and she chuckled.

  "I mean your taking the pot in the first place."

  "It was no big deal."

  "I think it was: You took something that wasn't yours."

  "Gwen wouldn't have cared. I told you, I've smoked pot before--two times. If I'd asked, she would have shared some with me," Charlotte said.

  "No way. There is no way Gwen would have let a twelve-year-old kid smoke her pot."

  "Why does everyone keep saying I'm twelve--"

  "Because you are!"

  "No, I'm not! I'm almost thirteen. If people want to round my age, they should round it up to thirteen!"

  "Fine, you're thirteen. There is still no way that Gwen would have let a thirteen-year-old smoke her pot--or anyone's pot!"

  "She wouldn't have had a choice," Charlotte said, and she lowered her voice slightly. "Maybe I would have pointed out to her that I could tell the grown-ups there were kids at the bonfire with dope if she didn't let me have some."

  "You would have done that to Gwen?"

  The older girl shrugged her shoulders. In reality, Willow knew, Charlotte wouldn't have dared. She wouldn't have wanted to anger this young adult whose friendship she cherished or do something as decidedly uncool as rat on a teenager
.

  "I guess I wouldn't have," Charlotte said after a moment. "But I still don't think Gwen would have minded all that much. I'm sure she would have given us a couple of puffs."

  Willow found herself nodding. Sometimes this was about as close to acquiescence as you got with Charlotte. "I think my mom had a good time," she said, consciously changing the subject. "Sometimes she says she gets a little shy at parties. But I think she thought this one was fun."

  "My mom sure thought so," Charlotte said, but she sounded annoyed.

  "What? You don't want your mom to have a good time?"

  "I want her to have a good time with Dad."

  "I don't understand."

  "You wouldn't. Your mom . . ."

  "My mom what?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "No, tell me."

  Charlotte draped her arm over her eyes. "I'm hungry," she said. "I think I have the munchies."