by Lily King
My parents didn’t name my brother Garvey. They named him Gardiner, after my father, and he was Gardiner all my life until he went to boarding school and came back Garvey. My mother tried to stop it, but he is Garvey now. At his graduation a few weeks ago even the headmaster called him Garvey.
We sit in a jagged circle in the grass. My mother’s dress is too short for her to sit Indian-style so she folds her legs off to one side, which tilts her toward Bob Wuzzy. I’m aware of how it will look to my father in the kitchen window, sipping his drink.
Bob makes us all go around and say our names, but after that we’re silent. Even the two grown-ups seem unable to keep up a conversation. We eat our burgers, then Bob says, “Who wants to play sardines?” and all of them cry out, “Me!” I know my father would rather I come in and sit with him, but my mother’s eyes are locked on mine.
Bob tells us we can only hide in the yard as defined by the back and front driveways, and not inside any of the buildings on the property. He makes it sound like a small college campus. Then he chooses a girl named Devon to hide first. The rest of us count aloud as fast as we can to fifty, omitting vowels and syllables, like racing down stairs three at a time. Then we scatter, to find Devon without anyone else seeing. I’m sure I’ll get to her first, since I know the terrain and all the good hiding places. I go first to the rhododendrons in front, then to the small empty fountain in the rose garden. After that I check behind the granite outcropping near the street. Soon everyone else is missing, too, except the little boy named Joe, my friend from the pool.
“Let’s check over there,” I call to him, pointing toward the small pines beyond the pool, but Joe runs off in the opposite direction.
As I pass the back porch, I hear a crinkling sound. They’re all in a tight cluster beneath the back steps, in a small, dark, spidery space that has always scared me. As I draw closer, the buzz of their chatter is so loud I wonder how I could have passed by twice without having heard them. I bend over and squeeze in. To fit all the way, I have to press up against several bodies. We’re all hot and our skin sticks. All their buzzing stops. No one says a thing. It seems to me that they’ve all stopped breathing. I try to think of something to say, something goofy the way Patrick can, that will make us all giggle. Out in the twilight of the yard little Joe begins to cry, and Bob Wuzzy tells us to come out.
The boy who found Devon first goes off to hide, and the rest run off to count. I slip back up the porch steps.
My father is eating a minute steak with A-1 sauce slathered all over it. His forehead and his nose are covered in sweat, the way they always are when he eats dinner. He’s staring straight ahead and I can’t tell if he knows I’m there.
“You’s a good kid, you know that, elf?” His words are skating slightly sideways.
When he’s done with dinner, he makes another drink. He gives me two tiny, vinegary onions from the bottle. In four days I won’t live here with him. When we come back to Ashing in the fall, my mother says, she and I will live in an apartment and I’ll only come up here on weekends.
The game outside has ended and no sounds come through the screen door. Then the pool lights go on, the little mushroom-shaped lamps in the grass and the big underwater bulb beneath the diving board. Bodies stream out of the poolhouse and crash into the water. My father’s body goes rigid at the sound.
He finishes his martini, jiggles the ice as he drinks to drain it of every drop. Then he sets the glass down on the counter. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
I don’t say no to my father’s ideas, just as I don’t say no to my mother’s. If my father had asked me to go away with him, I would have. My brother says no all the time when he’s home, and that just gets everyone all riled up.
We take off our clothes on the back porch. The puppy is with us, jumping around our ankles, sensing something different.
“Un, deux, trois,” my father says. He knows French from fishing in Quebec. “Go!”
He heads straight for the pool, his long tennis legs springing across the grass he keeps shorn and stiff, a bulb of muscle at the back of each calf, his thighs thin and taut, his bum high and flat and stark white in the dark, and his long arms flashing fast as he moves, the right stronger than the left, with an Ace bandage at the wrist. He moves in a way no one else in my family does, graceful as water. When he reaches the pool, he begins to grunt. He veers right, away from the corner where my mother and Bob Wuzzy sit with their sodas, and runs along the patch of grass between the length of the pool and the garden’s stone wall.
A boy floating on my red raft sees us first.
“Streakers!” he yells.
My father leaps over the short toadstool lights, one at a time, his grunts getting louder, his arms beginning to buckle toward his body, his spine bending forward. He takes the turn around the deep end, his body all sinew and strength, flecked with silver veins and tendons, glowing in the pale green pool reflection.
All the kids are yelling now, hooting and slapping the water, laughing so hard they have to swim over to the edge and hang on.
He saves my mother’s spot in the corner for last. He comes at her now head-on, past the poolhouse, right toward her seat in the chaise longue, his balls whipping from side to side, the penis boylike, small as a mouse. He curls his arms up all the way now, scratches at his armpits, and says, “Ooooo-ooooo-ooooo” right in her face, and then is gone.
My mother, for a moment, looks like she’s been tossed out of a plane. Then she reassembles a smile for Bob, who, for the children’s sake, is pretending it’s an odd but innocent prank. But when she sees me, something snaps. She lunges out of her chair to grab me, but I’m fast and slippery without clothes. I feel the thick, tough grass between my toes and the wet summer night air moving through the hair on my arms and through my hairless crotch. I’m boylike, too, with tight buds on my chest, and this night I’m nearly as lithe and quick and nimble as my father. Both my lungs are pumping hard. I don’t want to stop running, stop the burning of my stomach muscles and the ache in my throat, stop the stars from seeing my bare, newly eleven-year-old body in the grass, fast and graceful as a deer through the woods.
On the porch we stand laughing and panting together with our clothes at our feet and our puppy spinning in joyful circles and my father grinning his biggest grin and looking at me like he loves me, truly loves me, more than anyone else he’s ever loved in his life.
2
The day before my mother and I leave Ashing, I ride my bike down to Baker’s Cove. There isn’t much of a beach, and it’s smelly at low tide, so we usually have the place to ourselves. If you climb way out around on the rocks, no one can see you from the road.
Mallory’s got her mother’s Larks and I’ve got my father’s L&Ms and Gina’s got her father’s Marlboros. Patrick says his mother ran out, and Neal says neither of his parents smoke. No one believes him. This is the first time Neal Caffrey’s come to the cove with us. I’m not sure who called him.
“You’re just scared to steal,” Teddy says, pulling out a silver box full of menthols.
“My father has asthma,” Neal says. He takes one of the Salems and shuts the box. “Who’s G.E.R.?”
We all look at the swirled initials cut into the silver. Teddy’s last name is Shipley.
He shrugs. “Who cares?” He takes off his shoe. “Are we going to play or what?”
“I want to finish my cig,” Mallory says. She looks exactly like her mother when she smokes, her free hand tucked under the other arm which is bent up in a V, the cigarette never more than a few inches from her mouth.
The boys only ever want to kiss her, so they wait.
The air is thick and hot, but every now and then a cool gust comes off the water. You can see it coming, wrinkling the surface from far away as if it were a huge dark wing. Afterwards everything goes light and flat again. Neal’s curls have been blown around. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a crush and my heart is thrumming a little faster than normal. I can’t
look at Patrick because I know he knows. He’s like that.
“Who wants to go first?” Teddy asks.
“Me.” Mallory scrapes her cigarette out against the rock and pulls her hair into a ponytail, all business.
She spins Teddy’s topsider. When it stops, the toe points at me and everyone laughs. She spins again. It points to the space between Patrick and Gina.
“If it’s between people then you can choose anyone,” Teddy says.
“Patrick,” she says, and Patrick rolls his eyes. He always pretends he hates to be kissed.
They lean in toward each other and their lips meet for a quick peck. Mallory says she likes to pick Patrick because his lips are nice and dry.
It goes clockwise from Mallory. Neal is next. He spins the old crusted topsider with two hands. It wobbles to a stop, the toe pointing undeniably at me.
He stands all the way up, walks around the outside of the circle to me, takes my hand, pulls me up, and kisses me. It’s a warm kiss, not quite as quick as Mallory and Patrick’s. He lets go of my hand last. I know my face has flamed up and I keep my head down until the burning stops.
Gina kisses Teddy. Teddy kisses Mallory. Then it’s my turn. Neal, Neal, Neal, I beg but the shoe points at Teddy.
“Hat trick,” he says, meaning he’s gotten to kiss all three of us.
I get it over with fast. His lips are wet and flaky, like soggy bread.
When it’s Neal’s turn again, it lands between Gina and Teddy.
“Your choice,” Gina says, hopeful.
“Daley.”
And this time he leads me even farther away from them, nearly to the trees.
“You got a bed in the bushes?” Teddy says.
“I don’t like an audience,” Neal says. And to me, quietly, “You mind that I chose you again?”
I shake my head. I want to say I was hoping for it, but I can’t get the words out before he kisses me, longer, opening his mouth the slightest bit.
“That was nice,” he says.
“It was.” Everything feels so strange, like I’m walking into someone else’s life.
“Teddy says you meet here every week.”
“This is only our third time.”
“You coming next week?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Hey, stop yacking. It’s my turn,” Gina says. “And Patrick has to meet his grandmother at the beach club for lunch.”
They’re all turned toward us now. “Try,” Neal says quietly.
The game breaks up soon after that. We smoke a few more cigarettes and watch the seagulls drop mussels against the rocks and then fight over the smashed pieces.
“Can you imagine that being your life?” Patrick says.
“I’d throw myself off a cliff,” Teddy says.
“But you’re a seagull so it wouldn’t work,” Gina says. “Your wings would just start flapping. Are you taking sailing this year?”
“Yeah,” Teddy says. “You?”
“All three of us.” She points her thumbs to me and Mallory.
“Do you think any animal in the history of animals has ever committed suicide?” Neal asks.
“No. Their brains aren’t big enough to realize how stupid their lives are,” Teddy says.
I don’t know if it’s the cigarettes making me feel funny, but they all seem far away. If I spoke I would have to scream for them to hear me.
When we go, I let the others ride ahead, the five of them weaving around each other, taking up the whole road. I look back at the cove. I thought I had the whole summer for cigarettes and spin the shoe. A seagull lands where Teddy left a plum pit, pecks at it twice, then lifts back up into the air. The water is higher now, creeping up the barnacled sides of the rocks. Neal looks back for me through the opening between his right arm and the handlebar of his ten-speed, casually, as if he’s just looking down at his leg.
In the driveway my mother takes a wrench to my bike. I’ve never seen her use a tool from the garage before. She removes the two wheels easily and loads them along with the frame on top of our suitcases in the back of her convertible. She’s wearing a kerchief around her hair, the way she does when she gardens. Her movements are sure and studied, like a performance. She presses down on the trunk several times, and when it finally clicks a laugh bursts out of her, though nothing is funny.
Sometimes, when no one else can come get me, a teacher drives me home from school. It feels like that now, like a teacher, a stranger, is taking me somewhere.
“Hop in, sugar,” she says.
The ugly puppy is scratching at the screen door. My father will come home to his bright yellow urine and soft shit all over the newspaper I just spread across the whole kitchen. An hour ago I promised him I’d keep the puppy outside most of the day.
“You have to give him a lot of attention every time he goes to the bathroom outside,” he said. He was dressed in his summer work clothes—a tan suit and a light blue tie—his hair still wet from his shower, cleanly parted on the right. “You’ve got to go like this: good boy, good boy, good boy”—and he rubbed my belly and back at the same time, hard and fast, practically lifting me off the ground.
I laughed and said, “Okay, okay.” I held onto his arms after he stopped, dangling from him.
“You sure you can do that?”
“Yes.”
His hands were wide, tanned and bony, the nails bitten down, the veins sticking out blue-green and lumpy. He said goodbye, and I kissed his hands and let go.
In my mother’s car, the radio is always tuned to the news, WEEI. “Only five days after completing a tour of the Middle East,” a reporter is saying, “President Nixon arrived in Brussels, Belgium, today to confer with Western European leaders before going on to Moscow on Thursday.”
My mother speaks directly to the radio. “Oh, you can run, Dick. You can run, but you cannot hide.”
At the four-way stop, I look down Bay Street. Mallory’s house is the big white one on the corner, and Patrick’s is the last driveway on the left, across from the beach club. They will both call my house today, and no one will answer.
“As the president flew across the Atlantic today, his physician told reporters that he was still suffering from an inflammation of veins in his left leg. The president has known about this ailment, known as phlebitis, for some weeks now, but ordered that the condition be kept secret, his physician said.”
My mother snorts at the dashboard.
We drive through town. In the park, trailers have arrived with rides for the carnival that comes for a week every summer. Men are taking off enormous painted pieces of metal and setting them in the grass. The big round cars for the Tilt-a-Whirl, with their high backs and red leather seats, lie splayed out near what is normally first base. But once the rides, the stalls, and the vans with pizza and fried dough are set up, you can’t find the old park anymore. A few little kids look on, from the bleachers, like we used to.
Downtown is small, just one street with shops on it. Neal’s mother sometimes works at the yarn shop. Her car is outside it now, an orange Pinto with a small dent on the driver’s door. Traffic is slow coming from the opposite direction, tourists heading toward Ruby Beach. People wave to us—Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Buck—but my mother is gnawing on her lip and listening to the news and doesn’t pay attention to them. When we reach the highway she takes my hand and guns it to seventy-five.
We stop at the Howard Johnson’s for lunch. I like their fried clams because they’re just the necks, no bellies. The bellies make me throw up. But there is a mountain of them. They look like fat fried worms. I eat three. My mother can’t eat much of her club sandwich either. The waitress asks if we’d like to take the food home with us, and we both shake our heads no.
“We are going to be okay, you and I,” my mother says, rubbing my arm.
“I know,” I say, and my mother looks relieved.
Back in the car, she lets me put in an eight-track for a little while. I play John Denver singing about his
grandma’s feather bed. I play it over and over until she asks me to stop. It makes me happy, that song, all the kids and the dogs and the piggy in the bed together.
We cross into New Hampshire. Until she got married when she was nineteen, my mother spent every summer of her life on Lake Chigham. She says I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember it. I can only remember my grandparents in our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, sitting in chairs. I have no memory of them standing up.
After a while we get off the highway onto narrow then narrower roads. The trees seem to get taller. We turn onto a dirt road with a small white sign with blue paint: CHIGHAM POINT ROAD. Below it, in much smaller letters: Private Way.
My mother sucks in a deep breath and says, letting it out, “Here we go.”
I look down the road. There are no houses, just trees—pines and maples—blocking out every drop of sun.
“Remember it now?” my mother asks.
“No.”
We drive in. It’s a very long road with other roads leading off it, long driveways with last names painted on wooden boards nailed to trees. Occasionally, through all the trees and bushes and undergrowth, you can see the dark shape of a house or the glint of water. We turn down one of the last driveways and park beside a brown sedan. The house, made of dark brown wood, is only a few feet from the lake, which is still and too bright to look at after the dark road.
“Home again, home again,” she says in a sigh.
My grandfather comes out. His mouth is all bunched up like he’s angry and he moves quickly down the porch steps and my mother practically runs to meet him and they hug hard. My mother lets out a noise and Grindy says, “Shhhh, shhhhh now,” and strokes her hair until the kerchief falls on the grass. She says something quietly and he says, “I know. I know you did. Twenty-three years is enough trying.”
He motions to me with an arm and when I get close enough he pulls me into their hug and kisses me on the forehead.