“Something is going to happen at Twenty-one Lake Street,” Bob continued.
He could almost hear the officer shaking his head. “Do you know what’s going on tonight, buddy? Forget Lake Street,” he said. “Turn on the TV.”
* * *
And there it was: from the island of Cuba, Soviet missiles had been trained on the United States of America, and the nation’s attention shifted utterly to the possibility of full-scale nuclear war. Cast lists and who’s whos on Main Street were abandoned for the terrifying new vocabulary of Strategic Air Command, B-47s, and DEFCON 2. As President Kennedy prepared to defend the security of the entire western hemisphere, Joanie prepared to defend her family with cyanide salts, if it should come to that—better to go quickly than to wait for radioactive fallout—but Bob told her to get rid of them before Anne saw. The two of them hunkered down in front of their television set and tried to keep Anne close, inviting her to sit on the couch or even on Bob’s lap if she was scared, but she skittered away, catlike, watching her parents as much as they watched the news. She was almost fourteen; it was only natural for her to withdraw, perhaps, and Bob was too busy contemplating the lunacy of mutual assured destruction to truly worry about Anne’s teenage mood swings.
From the night of the president’s address to the morning of Khrushchev’s promise to remove all Soviet missiles from Cuba, less than six days would pass, but to Bob it would feel like a lifetime. After his ridiculous phone call to the police, he stayed home from work; then he and Joanie pulled Anne out of school, too, where she was being drilled hourly in the futile exercise of ducking under her wooden desk and covering her head with her bony arms. At night Bob tucked in his daughter, then watched his wife sleep with his hands folded in constant prayer: that Khrushchev would come to his senses; that the man with the jug ears and balding head of a doddering grandfather would be reasonable; that when Bob awoke from this nightmare he would be forgiven, and he would do better next time.
At the end of October Khrushchev blinked, and Bob’s relief was palpable. He breathed easier, slept better, woke early to do squat thrusts and lunges in the backyard. He greeted neighbors with hugs instead of handshakes, and he was extremely affectionate with his wife. They were alive, and life in America would indeed return to normal, just in time for Halloween.
Anne had never been one for costumes or trick-or-treating and predictably planned to hole up in her room, but this year especially Bob felt like celebrating. He went all out with scarecrows on the front lawn and jack-o’-lanterns on the porch. He bought a witch’s hat for Joanie and a pair of plastic fangs for himself. To punctuate the end of the Soviet Union’s threat of world domination, Bob and Joanie would hand out homemade popcorn balls to an endless stream of cowboys and hoboes in their tidy front yard.
Bob hadn’t thought about Stan Cavett or Tom Halloway in nearly ten days when he opened the newspaper the next morning and noticed a short wire item at the bottom of page three:
Local Author’s Home Vandalized
State and local authorities are searching for clues in a vandalism attack at 21 Lake Street, on the home of Mrs. Isabel Moore. Village police discovered the offense after midnight. The culprits used red paint to spray obscenities on all four sides of the large white frame house.
Mrs. Moore is the author of The Sex Cure, which deals with Cooperstown. She told reporters she had been warned something might occur and was staying with relatives overnight.
Joanie sat at the kitchen table directly across from Bob, with only a bowl of strawberry preserves and the salt and pepper shakers between them. He glanced up and she glanced up, then smiled.
“Anything interesting?” she asked.
In the last two weeks they’d held each other through the night, whispered kindnesses to each other in the dark, and neither of them had mentioned what Bob had done to Joanie in the car.
“Nothing interesting,” said Bob. He returned his eyes to the newspaper. In the next few hours he would memorize this item, but right now the words swam away on the page. He couldn’t imagine eating another bite of scrambled eggs. “I should get going,” he said. He folded the paper and slipped it into his briefcase, then kissed the cheek that Joanie offered him, first pushing back a curl of his wife’s silky hair.
In the driveway, Bob set his briefcase and overcoat in the passenger’s seat of his Buick, then crossed the backyard to the shed. It was locked. No broken windows, no apparent tampering. He glanced back at the house, then stood on his tiptoes and peered through the window closest to his worktable—there was the spray paint he’d bought on Market Street in Oneonta, right on the shelf where he’d left it, and Bob swayed with relief to know that the vandalism attack wouldn’t be tied to him.
But by the time Bob got to work he’d already missed a call from Stan Cavett, and he was debating whether to return it when Stan phoned again. Bob felt he had no choice but to take it.
“Jesus Christ,” Stan whispered into the receiver.
“Where are you?” asked Bob.
“Where do you think? Home with Betsy and the kids. We’ve got the entire Channel 4 News team on our lawn. The AP, the goddamn New York Times. Are you out of your mind?”
“I didn’t do it!” said Bob. “Tom never even told me the next step in the goddamn plan.”
“Fuck the plan,” said Stan. “You bought the paint, you made the threat. Whether you did it or not, they’re going to be looking for you.”
“Stan,” said Bob, “I had nothing to do with this. There are half a dozen places to buy red paint in town, and I checked my supply this morning—it’s all there.”
“Good luck with that story,” said Stan. “I heard from one of the reporters that they found a paint can in the bushes and they’re sending it to Albany for fingerprints. This was completely dead in the water before you pulled this stunt,” said Stan. “So fuck you.” And he hung up the phone.
Bob held the receiver in his hand, the sound of the dial tone washed out by the deafening noise in his own head. His mind was reeling—had his entire paint supply been there? Because Stan was right: no adult in his right mind would risk reigniting the scandal now that it was basically forgotten.
No adult.
Bob felt feverish and he didn’t object when his secretary sent him home. Joanie put him straight to bed, and he waited until he heard her car pulling out of the driveway—to Church & Scott for aspirin and ginger ale—before he bolted to the utility room for the keys to his shed. Now Bob wished to God he had returned the spray paint, but dozens of kids would have been out roaming the town on Halloween, and any one of them might’ve done this to the author’s house—there was no reason to suppose it had been his daughter—and just as Bob had convinced himself that he was being paranoid, he let himself into his shed and there, between the Turtle Wax and an old thermos bottle, were exactly two cans of Kerpro enamel paint in cherry red.
When Anne came home from school that afternoon, Bob met her at the kitchen door.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“No,” said Bob.
Anne kicked off her saddle shoes and set her schoolbooks on the bench in the mudroom. “Why are you in your robe?”
“Do you have something you want to tell me?” asked Bob.
Anne wide-eyed him, the portrait of innocence, her black bangs cut ruler-straight across her forehead, her kilt neatly safety-pinned at her knee. Bob raised his hand to her, thinking a slap across the face was the least she deserved, then froze when he noticed her socks: one standing at attention, the other slouching wearily around her calf, completely worn out. Suddenly, whatever the truth was, Bob didn’t want to know it. If his daughter had done this, Bob alone was responsible. He told her he wasn’t feeling well after all, then went straight to bed, sick with the knowledge that he’d dragged his family into such an abyss.
By the next morning, the vandalism story was in every newspaper in Otsego County and the Mohawk Valley. By Monday, the New York Times and the New York Mirror had publishe
d their own versions of events. A Utica paper ran a four-part series introducing the world to the woman behind the author and the sick town that loved to hate. As for the investigation, the chief of police announced that they were looking for three or possibly four adults who had spray-painted obscenities on the author’s house: letters twelve to fifteen inches in height and ranging from two to six feet above the ground. The police chief dismissed the idea that the vandals could’ve been kids acting out on Halloween. “The job was too perfect for teenagers to do,” he was quoted as saying, and Bob thought, You don’t know Anne.
Just as Stan had said, the investigation hinged on the paint: the police had recovered one can of red automobile paint from the bushes next to the author’s house, and they’d sent it to the state-police crime lab for fingerprint analysis. Apparently the brand Kerpro wasn’t sold in local stores. Bob’s prints were all over that can—as, he suspected, were his daughter’s—and his only comfort as he waited to hear if he’d be caught was the knowledge that he could protect Anne if it came to that. All signs pointed to Bob, anyway, and he would never let her take the fall.
Isabel Moore told reporters that her novel sounded like Cooperstown and it was supposed to, “a Glimmerglass version of Peyton Place.” Beacon Signal rushed The Sex Cure into a second printing, and a sign went up in one bookstore on Main Street saying, WE HAVE NOT SOLD NOR DO WE INTEND TO SELL THE SEX CURE, while another store, just down the block, continued to peddle it with a wait list 350 readers deep. When a construction crew appeared at the author’s house on Lake Street—whitewashing over messages like GO HOME BITCH and the stranger, more childish GET OUT SEX URGE—Joanie asked if anyone wanted to drive over and see the crime scene, and both Bob and Anne shook their heads.
Preston and Elva Hanson left town. Betsy Cavett took the kids out of school, and Joanie told Bob she’d heard they were staying with Tom and Audrey Halloway down in the city. Bob recommenced his late nights at the office, more to avoid Joanie’s Sex Cure–related updates than to meet a particular person for a drink—but really he was waiting, waiting for the phone call from the Bureau of Criminal Investigations in Albany, waiting to hear that they had traced the threat against Isabel Moore to his insurance agency, waiting for the police to discover the two remaining cans of Kerpro that Bob had thrown in a dumpster behind the diner in Milford, halfway between Oneonta and Cooperstown.
When word filtered through the rumor mill that the police department was discontinuing its search, that there were too many fingerprints on the paint can—including several from the police themselves—Bob finally slept through the night. It was over; they could go back to the way things had been before Bob had even heard of Stan Cavett. But they didn’t go back, they couldn’t, because the balance of power in Bob’s home had shifted absolutely. Anne kept to herself now, and no amount of courting could bring her back. If Bob offered to treat her to dinner at Sportsman’s Tavern or the Tunnicliff Inn, the way he used to, she suddenly had homework to finish or TV programs she couldn’t miss; if he suggested an afternoon at the rink behind Cooper Inn, she said she was too old for ice-skating, then Bob would find her white skates hanging by their laces in the mudroom, slushy water dripping from their blades.
One Saturday afternoon soon after Anne turned fourteen, Bob walked down to Main Street for lunch at Withey’s and discovered her alone at the counter, a vanilla Coke in front of her. He paused outside the drugstore, watching his daughter through the plate-glass window: she wore a white button-down shirt tucked into a pleated plaid skirt, and he wondered if she was waiting for someone—a friend, a boyfriend—but she’d already ordered, and the kids horsing around on nearby stools didn’t seem to notice her. They’d barely spoken in the last few months, and Bob had missed her deeply. He pulled open the door and called out her name, and Anne glanced up, looked straight at him, and ever so faintly shook her head.
His dynamic with Joanie, too, had changed. From time to time, when Joanie noticed he was staying late at work or had made Saturday plans with Charlie, she would pull the novel off her bookshelf and read a chapter or two before bed, and Bob would break off whatever insignificant dalliance he’d been involved in and return to his wife. Nearly a year after the vandalism attack, Bob had taken Joanie to Philadelphia for their anniversary and she spotted a tabloid at the newsstand with the headline THE SCANDALOUS NEW SEX NOVEL THAT SHOOK UP COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK!! She bought a copy for her scrapbook but didn’t read it, at least not in front of Bob.
At some point, though, Joanie had finally gotten rid of The Sex Cure—Bob hadn’t seen it for twenty years at least—and, truthfully, he’d always wondered if Anne had taken it. Certainly his daughter had never forgiven him for that time in her life, and it would be just like Anne to harbor the one concrete piece of evidence of her parents’ marital turmoil.
Bob scooted his chair back from the dinner table and stood, holding the squared edge for support, then made his way over to his daughter’s wall of books. He leaned against the corduroy couch and, in the dim moonlight, started with the first volume, running his hand over spine after spine, trying to remember what had happened to all those people, all those years ago. Stan and Betsy Cavett had moved to Chicago before eventually retiring to Florida; Tom Halloway had been killed in a car accident in the early seventies, driving too fast near Cobleskill on his way up to Cooperstown from the city. Bob had lost track of the Hansons, but then, he’d never really known them to begin with, never known any of them, and there had to be a thousand or more books in Anne’s library—if The Sex Cure was here, it was as good as buried, and Bob had no intention of digging up the past.
5
Tuesday afternoon, I handed Miss Paddy my library detention slip and watched her pore over it like it was a telegram from the front.
“Misbehavior in the cafeteria,” she read, winging her paperback across her generous knee. “Sounds exciting.”
Miss Paddy was triangular in shape, with hips the width of a sedan, teeny narrow shoulders, and hair that peaked in a knotted bun. We’d given her the slitter Conehead the Librarian, but Sam had since decided she needed a promotional slitter, something she could be proud of and also talk about on dates. Currently in R&D: Dewey, Dewey Dess, Mack Paddy, Miss System, and Overdue.
“It is exciting,” I said, leaning in.
Yesterday at lunch, while Carl had been interrogating me about my grandparents’ house—were we selling it? Could we get a lot of money for it? Was it weird to think of someone else living there?—Sam had noticed the shelf of tears collecting on my lower lids. “Here,” he’d said, handing me his gnawed Granny Smith. “If you make it, I’ll muzzle Carl.”
So I’d launched Sam’s apple over six cafeteria tables to the garbage bins by the exit, missing my mark by fifteen feet. In an instant our lunch monitor was on me, hauling me by the elbow to retrieve the fallen core. After a brief lecture I was allowed to show her how well I could place it in its proper receptacle, and I did such a fine job that she permitted me to do it for every piece of garbage in the cafeteria’s busing station.
“What is it with you, Miss Obermeyer?” she’d asked, depositing me back at our table along with a yellow slip for library detention. “Watch her, please,” she’d said, and Sam had nodded deeply, his aqua eyes dancing over mine.
“How Edenic,” said Miss Paddy. “And I thought I was in the clear today. Guess this means we both have to stay.”
“Or we could both leave,” I suggested.
She smiled, striping her front teeth with tangerine lipstick. “At least you won’t be bored.” She gestured toward the shelves and told me to pick a book.
“Actually,” I said, unzipping my backpack and producing The Sex Cure, which had been in the front pocket since my final trip to Nonz and Poppy’s. Sam had spied its faded cover during homeroom—a woman in high heels and a short skirt looking lustily skyward while a young doctor pawed her lacy bra from behind—and said, “Flag the good stuff for me.” It was only then that I’d decided to read it
.
Miss Paddy whistled appreciatively. “This is rare,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”
“It was my grandparents’.”
“They were smart to keep it. I read it at the historical society in one sitting.”
“Is it any good?” I asked.
Miss Paddy shrugged. “It’s historic.”
I found a table around the corner from her desk, next to a set of World Book encyclopedias. Every September in the first week of school our English teachers administered aptitude tests on our library skills—dittoed packets requiring numerous trips to the card catalog. We’d grab entire drawers until the cabinet looked like a gap-toothed first-grader, the only recourse being to hunt for the books themselves or, when a teacher wasn’t looking, to ask Miss Paddy, who might take pity. I felt sorry for her being stuck in here all day. There were no nooks or beanbag chairs. No windows for daydreaming. Just a theater of laminated posters, fluorescent lights, outdated magazines, and a wall clock that seemed to be frozen at 3:05.
I thought of Sam and Carl driving around in the Badass Scirocco Scirocco without me. I pictured them stopping at Stewart’s for snacks, then smoking our OPs on Dead Man’s Run, the sledding-hill nunnery behind the courts.
“What’re you guys doing after practice?” I’d asked before turning myself in.
“Not sure,” said Sam. His car keys clicked against each other in his hand.
“We’ll figure it out,” said Carl, taking the OPs and leaving me with only a single Camel to smoke on my walk home.
I traced the fresh ballpoint tattoo on my wrist, which was already fading. “Draw something new,” I’d told Sam during study hall today, and here it was—a bench: slatted, wooden, like the ones at the tennis courts, or maybe like the ones on the boardwalk at Myrtle Beach; vacant, bare, like someone had just left or maybe like someone was about to arrive.
I opened to the first chapter of The Sex Cure and read: Marge’s nakedness was a sliver of earthbound moonlight. I skipped ahead. I wasn’t sure this was what Sam had had in mind. Style-wise, the author had seen too many soaps or something and was high on the art of the recap. Like, okay, we get it: a married doctor financing his girlfriend’s illegal abortion is not going to fly with his wife. Porn-wise, the sex scenes were tame enough to be featured on the six o’clock news, and plot-wise, I pretty much had no idea who anyone was.
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