Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  I tried to remember to listen. But there were always a few moments in which even I could not be cautious enough to subdivide my mind. I threw off the covers and felt that private wildness inside me rise up and carry me over a great, shivering chasm of joy, the only unbridled pleasure I knew.

  It took time to recover myself. Afterward, I lay there, legs splayed, eyes closed, grateful for the warmth inside of me, until I felt the particular sensation of being watched. I lifted my eyes to the window just above Ev’s bed.

  There, framed by wood and glass, was the face of a man.

  His eyes were glazed over.

  His mouth was agape.

  I screamed. He ducked. I covered my whole self with the quilt. I laughed, horrified, nearly suffocating under the duvet. Almost burst into tears. Peeked out from beneath the quilt again. The window was empty. Had there really been someone there? Oh god. A new level of humiliation. I would never forget the look on his face—a mix of lust (I hoped) and horror (more likely). He’d been freckled. Dirty blond hair. I could feel myself blushing from head to toe. When I got up the nerve, I strode to the window, wrapped in the comforter, and wrestled the resistant, dusty blind down into submission before dressing myself with nunlike modesty. Maybe they’d kick me out of Winloch before we even got to the inspection.

  Ev returned an hour later, moss tangling her locks. She smelled like a child who’d been playing in the forest, and her face bloomed with a smile she was doing her best to hide. Eager for distraction, I offered to cook, but she insisted I sit at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and let her do the work for once, a dubious allowance, since I knew that she could hardly boil water without setting the kettle on fire. As she bustled about the white metal cabinets, art deco refrigerator with a heavy, ka-thunking door pull, and dirty seafoam-green linoleum curling up at the edges, my fingers traced the repeating, once-vibrant pattern of blackberries and gingham that had protected the table during someone else’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

  The kitchen had once been the short part of the L that made up the porch, and it retained the casement windows from its earlier life as a sunroom. Because the waist-to-ceiling panes overlooked the Bittersweet cove, what might have been a gloomy room glittered, making it the most beautiful spot in the cottage. But I resisted the view, keeping my back to the woods and water, remembering, with fresh embarrassment, the feeling of that man’s eyes upon me. He was out there, somewhere. What was to keep him from telling? The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

  “Galway said he met you this morning,” Ev mentioned, casually clicking on the stove’s pilot light to heat the green enamel percolator set on the back burner. My pulse began to race. That man in the window was the only person I’d seen all day. Did she know? Had he told her? Had she read my mind?

  “He’s pretty awkward,” she said apologetically. She glanced at me for a moment, catching the expression on my face. “Was he awful to you?”

  “What’d he say?” I managed to squeak.

  Ev rolled her eyes. “Galway doesn’t say anything unless it serves his own political gains.” I breathed a sigh of relief as she babbled on. “Don’t worry, he’s only coming up weekends.” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially, as if I had any idea what she was talking about. “Now you know firsthand why he’s terrible with women,” she chirped, as I resolved simply never to see Galway again, whoever he was, while Ev went on to tell me how ill-equipped her brothers were for any kind of love, even though two of the three of them had managed to find wives. But Galway would be a bachelor forever, although she was almost positive he wasn’t gay, he seemed extremely hetero to her, mostly because he was an asshole, and if she was going to pick one of them to be gay she would have picked fussy Athol, although Banning was such a pleasure seeker (this is how I gathered, with horror, that Galway was her brother)—and then she served me a burned scrambled egg and lukewarm, bitter coffee, rendered drinkable only after I added a healthy slug from a dented can of condensed milk found on the shelf above the sink, and gave dictation on the provisions and products we would need John to pick up in town for the coming days of cleaning.

  Even then, I was glad I’d come.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Cleanup

  The cottage Ev stood to inherit had been inhabited, until her demise the previous summer, by Ev’s great-aunt Antonia Winslow. Although Ev insisted the ancient woman hadn’t actually died in the house, it was easy to imagine that the yellowed piles of papers that lined every room, or the permeating combination of animal urine and mildew that radiated from the furniture, or the sulfuric smell bubbling from the pipes every time we turned on the water, might well have conspired to bring about her end.

  I expected Ev to be overwhelmed in the face of such disrepair, but she seemed energized by the challenge of it. I thought I’d be the one to teach her that newspapers and a touch of vinegar were best for windows, or that you diluted the Pine-Sol in a bucket of warm water, but her years spent getting into trouble at boarding school had taught her plenty about deep and thorough cleaning. Covered in dust after spending three hours sorting and binding the papers from the living room, I asked her, “Why do you have to clean this place?” After all, the Winslows could afford the help; this backbreaking labor seemed to contradict everything that photograph above my desk had appeared to promise.

  “We believe in hard work,” she said, tucking a piece of hair back into the bandanna she’d tied over her head. “It’s tradition: when we turn eighteen, we’re each offered a cottage—usually the oldest, dirtiest one available. And then it’s up to us to make it livable. To prove ourselves.” She frowned. “It’s been the big joke that when it’s my turn I won’t be able to hack it.” And then she met my eyes. “But they’re wrong, aren’t they?”

  Her vulnerability hit me in the gut. I knew what it was to be doubted. To need to prove yourself. “Of course they’re wrong.” And so, for the next six days, we both went to town on that cottage and its five little rooms—bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, sun-porch—as though our lives, and not merely our summers, depended on it.

  Once we’d cleared away the superficial mess (even if the backbreaking labor didn’t feel superficial), it became apparent that Bittersweet was a tidy cottage, good-boned after a hundred years, even if its musculature showed its age. On blustery nights, the wind sang through invisible gaps between the casements and their frames. The off-white bead board walls had been slapped with paint dozens of times, rendering the grooves between some of the slats all but nonexistent. What furniture we were able to salvage was mismatched: in one corner of the living room, a wooden chair with a fraying straw seat waited humbly before a nicked mahogany desk that had once been part of a grander household, while in the other corner, a sagging red chair with cotton spilling from its split corduroy upholstery held the distinguished position as most coveted reading spot in the house.

  On our second afternoon, John returned with the groceries we’d ordered. He had delivered our box of cleaning products the previous day with what I took to be silent grudgingness, but when I’d asked Ev about it she’d replied, “It’s his job,” which was how I’d found out he was a servant.

  Lest Ev confuse me with the help, I let her and John unload while I sank into the red chair with a glass of lemonade. I watched Abby drop a browned, balding tennis ball onto Bittersweet’s uneven floorboards, painted a flaking Portuguese blue. The ball rolled in a straight line toward the crumbling brick fireplace, with its tarnished brass andirons, before inexplicably turning around the curve of a faded rag rug and heading north, toward the dimly lit wooden bathroom, with its stained sink and pull-chain toilet.

  Abby’s ears twitched with excitement as she traced the ball’s trajectory. She panted as though it were alive, but I held her back, fascinated to see where it would end up if we left it alone. Sure enough, it hit upon a burl, cascading east again and nearly into the cottage’s bedroom before plunging, along the line of a sunken floorboard, straight south towar
d the cove, back across my path, through the close living room, and into the jewel of the kitchen. I jumped up and followed. The old ball pinged against the metal cabinet that housed the deep porcelain sink, then through the doorway that separated kitchen from living room. On this new, northwest course, it headed into the screened-in porch, with its worn wicker couch, half-patched screens that allowed in the whistling breeze, and private view of the watery cove below.

  The ball landed at John’s feet as he stepped through the yawning screen door. He picked it up and tossed it outside. Abby gamely followed. “Why’d you let her in here?” he asked crossly.

  I hadn’t.

  John dumped the last bag on the kitchen table and headed back out onto the porch just as Ev came through the doorway. Her body blocked his way. She jutted her hip out playfully. He sidestepped, pretending to ignore her, lifting a piece of mail off one of the many stacks of newspapers, rain-warped and moldy, that lined the porch.

  “Antonia Winslow,” he intoned in an attempt at a Waspy voice, before dropping the paper back onto the pile and making a move toward the door, then reached for his jacket pocket. “Right, I forgot.” He pulled out three bolts just like the one I’d seen on Ev’s Manhattan bedroom door.

  A cloud passed over Ev’s face. “You’re not serious.”

  “You want to get me fired?”

  Ev sighed. John left to get his tools from the truck.

  “What’re those for?” I asked once he was gone.

  Ev rolled her eyes. “My mother is terrified of bears.”

  John returned and set to work, drilling holes and turning screws into the wooden frame. The muscles in his arms rippled as he worked, and I realized Ev and I were watching him in mutual, unabashed wonder. The glazed expression on her face reminded me of what Galway had looked like at the window, and I slipped into the kitchen as I felt myself turn scarlet.

  It wasn’t until later that night, long after John had whistled to Abby and gunned his engine into the afternoon, that I noticed the other two bolts now installed on the insides of the bedroom and bathroom doors. Bears? Really?

  With every inch of Bittersweet I cleaned, I came to know it as my own. I shoved armfuls of Antonia Winslow’s personal papers into garbage bags already filled with decades of other abandoned piles: calendars, shopping lists, newspapers. I sorted the magazines into their own pile, aching for the day I could flip through them. I lugged the garbage bags down to the crawl space below the porch to store them until we could make a trip to the dump and properly recycle them.

  “Just think of when we’re old ladies,” Ev said, as she scrubbed at the grout around the kitchen sink, knuckles bleeding. “We’ll sit on the porch and drink martinis.” My heart leapt when I realized what she was promising—a lifetime of Winloch. And so I joined her. As I scraped flaky paint from the windowsills, I admired our view out of the warped windowpanes, through which the straight trunks curved and parried whenever I moved my head. I braved rickety chairs to poke a rag-covered broom handle at the decades-old cobwebs hanging above the fireplace bookshelves. I bent before the cabinet underneath the bathroom sink, sorting through glass bottles and aluminum jars that held dried-up calamine lotion and the lingering camphor of Noxzema. We were positively nineteenth century, bundling up all the linens and sending them out to be washed, concocting strange recipes to use up the canned peas, Spam, and cream of mushroom soup that had been stashed on the pine shelves in the kitchen long enough to accumulate a thick layer of dust. Ev gobbled down the expired food as if it were caviar. Whereas for me, such meals brought up bad memories, for her, it was a point of pride—for the first time in her life, she was eating what she had earned.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Stroll

  On the fourth day, it rained. The constant patter was comforting, the best memory I’d brought from the Pacific Northwest. Though the cottage uttered small complaints against the gusts buffeting up from the cove, the roof did not leak (save for a spot in the bathroom, but that was nothing a rusty, pinging Sanka can couldn’t fix), and the damp air wafting in from the screen porch somehow made our cleaning feel all the more appreciated.

  It was good to roll up my sleeves and see results. But it wasn’t lost on me that part of why I was burrowing, so gamely, into the cleaning—beyond the time alone with Ev and what my elbow grease might secure for me—was that it gave me a reason to hide. I could taste the humiliation anew every time I thought of Ev’s brother’s face in the window. Saturday loomed, when Birch would descend and give us the thumbs-up or -down. As the week drew to a close, I comforted myself in knowing I wouldn’t have to step beyond the walls of Bittersweet at least until after our inspector arrived.

  But on the fifth day, after Ev tromped in from her morning walk and declared, “I’ve decided that I’m much better as an early bird than a night owl, so from now on, I shall go to bed at ten o’clock sharp” (which we both knew was a lie but which we nodded at together in fiendish denial), she further announced, “And I’m going to scrape the porch on my own today, so you’re free, free, free!” I realized that what she was saying in her Ev way was that she wanted the cottage to herself, and, although I took the news somewhat grudgingly, I had known all along that I’d have to leave Bittersweet someday. It was Friday morning. If Ev was right about Galway only coming up on weekends, then he wasn’t at Winloch yet. A stroll through the woods wouldn’t do me any harm, and I’d get to finally explore the place I’d been dreaming of and, yes, researching, for months.

  Although Vermont is frigid in the winter, its summertime shimmers. That’s stating the obvious to anyone who knows New England, but it was my brave new world. The mud season that begins in March and lasts well through May buffers one’s mind from winter’s ravages, so that, by the glorious day when neon-green leaf buds first appear on every tree, one can barely remember the bitter February winds streaming off the lake in great, frigid sloughs. Every year, the lake freezes solid around the shoreline, groaning and cracking under the push of the shifting wind, but, in the century-long life of Winloch, the winter had been heard only by the workingmen, men called in to plow the roads, or plumb frozen pipes, men who had the north country in their blood and the dried-up curl of French Canadian on their tongues. Winloch was a summer place, built of pine and screen and not much else, and the Winslows its only, rarefied, inhabitants.

  It had been that way for over a century. Ev’s great-great-grandfather Samson Winslow, 1850–1931, paterfamilias—captured in black-and-white photographs, arms akimbo, on the deck of a sloop, in front of a bank, beside his blushing bride—looked at once a dinosaur and a modern man. Only the clothes set him back. The shape of his face—high cheekbones, wry smile—was full of twentieth-century vigor. His mother was Scottish, his father a Brit, and his was iron money, invested in coal money, invested in oil money. Once Samson had made himself a good fortune, he moved his young family to a grand manse in Burlington proper, washed the coal dust and sticky oil from his hands in the limpid lake, and bought himself a tract of farmland that stretched beside its waters. The lake, laid out at the foot of the Green Mountains that gave Vermont its name, reminded him of the lochs of his mother’s homeland. He married that name with his own, and called his paradise Winloch.

  Even though the tract Samson obtained was only fifteen miles from town—practically next door, in our car-choked era—in his day, getting there required a migration. White winters were passed in the banks of Burlington and Boston, tranquil summers on sailboats that skimmed the depths. And in between, a twice-yearly trek, first in buggies, then in Model Ts, of wives, sons, daughters, dogs, dresses, chairs, apples, potatoes, novels, tennis rackets. And a twice-weekly delivery of groceries.

  Samson envisaged a village peopled with Winslows in the land he named Winloch. He had hundreds of meadowed and forested acres to work with, and set out to build the Dining Hall with his own two hands (he was helped by those same workingmen who braved the roofline and replaced burst pipes, but to mention them was to lessen th
e Winloch mythology). The cottages sprouted up, in turn, around the great hall, like the plants they were named for—Trillium and Queen Anne’s Lace and Bittersweet and Goldenrod and Chicory—and were soon peopled with Samson’s descendants and their companions: a parade of loyal, soggy Labradors, Newfoundlands, Jack Russells, and a few memorably morose basset hounds, ears permanently sodden from their daily wades.

  Soon, dinghies littered the low-lying sandstone outcroppings and the rocky beaches of the shoreline. As more land became available, Winloch acquired it, so that, by the time Samson’s great-great-great-grandchildren were learning how to swim off the docks that stretched like fingers from the thirty-some-odd cottages into the water, the compound occupied two miles of the shore of Lake Champlain in sheltered Winslow Bay, a favorite of the mooring yachts down from Canada.

  I had gathered a few of these snippets from Ev and her nonchalant boarding school friends who’d visited us during the spring, but those conversations had mostly centered on which of Ev’s cousins was cutest or the nearest place you could drive for underage booze. Once I felt sure Ev’s invitation was airtight, I conducted my own research, a stealthy interlibrary loan with the help of my friend Janice the librarian, and Samson Winslow: The Man, the Dream, the Vision and The Burlington Winslows both found their ways from northern libraries into my hands. I’d spent one damp March weekend in the gothic Reserve Room of the college library, poring over photographs of Winloch in the early part of the twentieth century, as rain lashed the windows in a satisfying thrum. Samson had been aptly named—his hair was so positively mane-like toward the end of his life that one couldn’t help wonder if his idyll would have crumbled had his locks been cut. He seemed to my imagination to be the sort of man who’d loom large in family stories, but the few times I dared prompt Ev for a really great Samson tale she’d rolled her eyes and muttered a “You’re so weird.”