by Lily King
Nonnie is in the doorway when we come in with all our bags. She kisses us both on the cheek. Her skin is fuzzy and she smells like one of those tiny pillows you put in your drawer to scent your clothes. She isn’t really my grandmother, my mother tells me that night, when we are lying in our twin beds in the room we share. I have never known this. It turns out I’ve never met my real grandmother. She lives in Arizona, and my mother hasn’t seen her since Garvey was a baby.
Nonnie still has a young face but old hair, completely white. She keeps it pinned up, but if you go down into the kitchen early enough you can catch her in a blue plaid robe and her hair, brushed to a shine, spilling down past her waist. The rest of the day it’s gone, braided and coiled behind her head.
At dinner that night, Grindy argues with my mother about Nixon. “All these testimonies and hearings are just putting a stopper on everything else. These ridiculous tapes! The country doesn’t need to listen to all that nonsense. We are in a serious recession. Let the man deal with things that matter.”
“Nothing matters more than this, Da. People need to be held accountable. Otherwise we’re paving the way for another Hitler.”
Grindy shakes his head. “Little girl,” he says, and then his voice grows very sharp. “You mustn’t ever speak of Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler in the same breath. Ever. Richard Nixon did not know about Watergate.” My mother tries to interrupt but he holds up his hand. “He did not know about it, and all he is guilty of is trying to protect his own men from going to prison. You are naive, little girl. There is always internal spying. Always. These people got caught. But the president needs to be able to get back to the business of running the country.”
My mother looks like she’s looking at my father. Nonnie asks if anyone would like more beans.
After dinner my grandfather watches the Red Sox. I stand behind his chair and polish his bald head with my sleeve. I’m fascinated by the sheen of his scalp, the white age spots, the brown age spots. My mother tells me to leave him alone but he tells her it feels nice. The thin layer of brown shiny skin smells like mushrooms before they’re cooked. When I go to bed, he puts his hands over my ears and gives me a hard kiss of bristles on my forehead.
My mother insists that my father knows where we are, but I can’t understand why he hasn’t called or driven up. I pick up the phone every now and then, to see if it really does work, then hang it back up. He must be so mad at me.
On the map of the lakes region in my grandparents’ dining room, where we are is circled in red. Our point looks like a little tonsil hanging off the north side of the lake.
“It’s like being in a bunker,” my mother says to someone on the phone, probably her friend Sylvie. “No light comes in the windows. You have to go out into the middle of the lake to see the sun.”
In the upstairs hallway there is a photograph of my mother standing on the dock in a white two-piece bathing suit, scratching her leg. Her skin is brown against the white and she is smiling. In the background a few girlfriends are waiting for her in the water. Those friends still come back here, with their own families, and my mother wonders aloud to me in our slope-ceilinged room how they can do it, return each summer, year after year, to the same people, the same cocktail parties, the Fourth of July picnic, the August square dance, the endless memorial services for all the old people who died over the winter.
Eventually my mother drags over a girl named Gail to meet me. She’s going into sixth grade too, but looks much older. I take her up to my room to show her my albums.
“You’re tiny,” she says, wrapping her fingers around my wrist. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and we smoke a few on the third floor next to an old seamstress’s mannequin. The taste reminds me of kissing Neal.
She comes over nearly every day after that. I’m the only other girl her age nearby. When it rains we play Spit and War in our living rooms and on sunny days we swim out to the float that is for all the families on the point or play tennis on the disheveled court in the woods. She introduces me to the other kids. Most of them are my second cousins, though they don’t really believe that. Or maybe they don’t care. Even though we aren’t in school I can tell Gail is the popular type. She has that thrust of personality that matters so much more than looks. I follow her around, the tail to her kite, grateful to be mysteriously attached.
After two weeks my father calls during dinner. Nonnie answers and returns quickly.
“It’s Gardiner.” She stands in the doorway, waiting to see if my mother will take the call.
“I’m not sure you should,” my grandfather says, but my mother gets up and goes to the phone, which is below the stairs in the living room. She speaks so low we can’t hear much, but I can see her straight stiff back and the way she holds the receiver several inches from her ear. When she calls me in and passes the heavy black receiver to me, my father asks me to come home.
“That’s what I want. I want you and your mother to come home.” His voice is high, like he’s making fun of something, but he isn’t. He’s almost crying. I smell him, smell the steak and the A-1 sauce and the little onions in his drink.
I’m not sure what to say. After a long silence, he tells me he’s named the puppy Scratch, that he’s a good boy, and that Mallory and Patrick came over to the pool to swim yesterday. His voice becomes regular and he says he took Scratch to the vet that afternoon. He got four shots and he was so brave.
“He’s right here,” he says, “right next to me, and he says hello to you and wants you to come home soon, little elf.”
“I’ll try, Dad.”
After I hang up I can see his hands and the sweat on his nose, and I miss him so much it feels like my skin is coming off.
In the dining room, my mother is complaining about him and the martinis and how he obviously talked to a lawyer who advised him to act like he wanted her back. “You watch,” my mother says, “he’ll write a letter. He’ll put it in writing.”
My grandmother sees me listening and asks if anyone wants more chicken.
I write to Mallory, Patrick, and Neal Caffrey. Mallory writes back first. She typed her letter in the shape of a giraffe.
Patrick writes next, on a turquoise card with his name embossed at the top.
Dear Daley,
I got this stationery for Christmas and this is the first time I’ve used it. It’s kind of dumb. We’ve been using your pool a lot. Hope you don’t mind. It’s hot here. Mr. Amory and me went to the supply place for more chlorine and a new DPD kit. We also went to Payson’s for an extension cord and thumbtacks. When are you coming back? The carnival is over. Elyse threw up on the Scrambler. It was gross. We capsized three times yesterday.
Love,
Patrick
I was the one who used to go with my father on all his weekend errands. The last time we were at Payson’s, he bought me a round key chain, one of the big silver ones like the kind the janitors at our school have that clip on a belt and have a little hard button in the middle you push to reel the keys back in. I forgot to bring it with me, and after I read Patrick’s letter I cry hard for that stupid key chain.
Then my father writes, like my mother said he would, a joint letter to both of us, asking us to come back. He used the white stationery from the desk in the living room that has our name and address on it in red letters. He wrote in blue ballpoint, pressing down hard against the blotter beneath so it feels like Braille on the other side. He says he misses us and loves us and wants us to come home and live with him. My mother lets me keep the letter in the pocket of my suitcase. She doesn’t write back. I do, but I don’t want to sound like I’m having a good time and I don’t want him to worry that I’m unhappy, so it’s a bad, boring letter. He never writes again.
After my father’s letter, Nora begins to send me cards with flowers or bluebirds on them and little poems on the inside. One says,
Before this little bird flies away
He wants to wish you a happy day.
She signs th
em Love Always, Nora.
I wait for a letter from Neal. I go with my grandfather nearly every morning to the Chigham General Store, where he buys a Boston Globe and a pack of Hot Tamales for me. Then we cross the street to the little post office. A woman named Mavis sits behind the counter. She blushes no matter what my grandfather says to her. I stand in a different spot in the small room each time, thinking if I can just stand in the right place a letter from Neal will be in my grandfather’s box. It can be as long as five or ten minutes that my grandfather talks to Mavis, never seeming to notice the hot flush of her flabby, downy cheeks. And then he reaches into his pocket for the key and steps over to box No. 5 and I stare down at the wooden planks of the floor until I hear the box click shut, my heart leaping in my body until I see that there’s nothing from Neal, and then it slows slowly down.
At the end of July, my brother comes to Lake Chigham with his new girlfriend, Heidi.
“Hermey!” he says, and picks me up in a big squeeze. He’s a little smelly and unshaven. “Hermey’s gotten so tall and even more fluffy-haired.” He calls me Hermey because I remind him of the little toymaker who wants to be a dentist on Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.
“It’s the humidity,” I say, trying to mush down my frizz.
He introduces Heidi. She has long smooth hair and clear green eyes. He met her at the end of June at a party in Somerville, where he’s living for the summer.
“What day in June?” I ask him later, after dinner.
“I don’t know. It was a Monday night.”
“The twenty-fourth.” She hits my brother softly.
“Ow,” he says, not meaning it.
“The night before we left Myrtle Street,” I say. Everything for me is divided there, the before and the after.
“I’m going to marry her, Daley,” he says on the couch after dinner, when she goes to the bathroom. He puts his hands on his head and presses down. “Fuck. I’m going to marry her.”
When she comes back he clutches her tight, paws her hair, whispers something, and laughs into her neck. I’ve never seen him with a girl. He always only came home with other boys. They’d stay in his room all weekend, playing their guitars and rolling what looked like dirt into little squares of tissue paper. They listened to records I’d never heard of, cleaned every scrap of food out of the fridge and pantry, and then disappeared in a car until next time. But with Heidi, Garvey is very different. He’s soft and mild and always asking her what she thinks or what she wants.
“He’s really fallen in love,” my mother says.
We lie in our twin beds and listen to them murmuring in Heidi’s room. My mother tells me about her first love. She met him here one summer. He was visiting her cousin Jeremy. I know Jeremy. He looks like an old man already with tough leathery skin. He always wants a few kids to go out sailing with him, but he barks at you if you pull the wrong line on his boat. Jeremy’s friend was named Spaulding. He spied my mother from Jeremy’s porch.
“‘You’re a pretty thang,’ he said to me, just like that, thang because he was from Georgia and that made me curious. I was fourteen. I climbed right up onto the porch. The first night we went out I told him I felt like I was in a novel. That’s the way he made me feel. It’s the way I always feel when I fall in love.”
Garvey and Heidi have stopped talking and are making other noises. I know what they’re doing but it sounds like they’re both jumping on the bed, which I’m never allowed to do.
“We’re all lucky my father is losing his hearing,” my mother says.
The next day we go to one of the islands in the middle of the lake with a bucket of fried chicken. On the picnic blanket my brother licks the grease off Heidi’s fingers until my grandmother reminds them of their napkins. Then they go for a walk around the island. My grandparents walk in the other direction, shoes on, arms linked, leaning into each other as they speak. My mother, in her yellow bikini and enormous sunglasses, reads the newspaper, talking to it like she always does. “A five-minute-and-eighteen-second gap in the latest tape. How shocking.”
For a split second I think it’s my father on the front of the paper —the stoop, the heavy eyebrows, the small eyes—but it’s Nixon, waving from the metal stairs of his airplane.
Late that night, Garvey, Heidi, and I go for a walk all the way to the main road where the sky opens up and there are so many stars it’s hard to find the dippers or Cassiopeia. They seem to all be receding even as I watch them, but everything feels far away this summer; everything feels like it’s backing away from me. Heidi explains to me that most of the stars we’re seeing don’t exist anymore. They’ve died. But because they’re so far away and their light takes so long to get to us, we can still see them, even though they’re not there anymore.
“Aren’t there any new ones?” I ask.
“Yes, but we can’t see them yet.”
I crane my head up and stare at the dead stars. I don’t like that we’re seeing light from things that don’t actually exist. I feel how flimsy a life is, how flimsy the universe is. I’m just going to die and not even leave a spit of light behind. I jerk my head down to the earth but it doesn’t help. There are no streetlights. I can’t seem to take a deep breath. My hands and then arms begin to tingle, like they have fallen asleep, like they can’t get enough blood. In a split second, for no good reason, my heart starts racing, faster than it ever does in the post office, so fast it seems like there’s nothing for it to do but explode. I’m dying. I feel suddenly sure of this. I keep walking but I feel like crouching, curling up in a small ball and begging someone to make the feeling pass. My brother and Heidi walk ahead and it seems like they are about to step off a huge cliff and I know that I’m dying but I can’t call to them. My voice is gone. I’m disappearing. They turn back down the point road. I urge my legs to follow them.
“No they’re not,” I hear my brother say.
“Yes they are.”
My brother laughs and for a second he sounds just like my father. He taps her head. “What do you have in there, marshmallow fluff?”
“It’s true. My dad and I used to take walks at night, and he taught me about the stars.”
“The french fry maker is a closet astronomer?”
She punches him. Hard. He laughs, then punches her back just as hard.
I can’t get enough air. I can’t get my heart to slow down. I can’t even feel any space between the beats.
“Screw you,” Heidi says, and takes off running.
“Garvey,” I begin, wanting to tell him that I need to go to the hospital.
“She’s not mad,” he says. “She likes to play a little rough sometimes.”
The sound of his talking to me is soothing. “She’s nice,” I say. My voice is strange, like from a tin can. But I hope he’ll keep talking and he does. He tells me that she has this birthmark on her hip that drives him wild and that she kisses like a catfish in heat.
When we get back to the house she isn’t there. Garvey calls for her and she answers from far away. We find her sitting on the grass outside Cousin Jeremy’s house.
“All the driveways look the same,” she says.
My brother leans down and she pulls him to her and I don’t stay for the rest. I decide I’m not going to die and go back to my grandparents’ house.
Every Friday morning, my mother drives down to Boston to see her lawyer. She stays in the city for dinner, and I fall asleep on the couch waiting up for her. She brings back a present each time: a jump rope, a deck of magic cards, a Watergate coloring book about people called the Plumbers and a hippie talking to a faceless man named Deep Throat in a parking garage. The rest of the days she stays on the point with me. She says I can take sailing lessons, but I don’t want to. I like being with her. We listen to the music I brought—Helen Reddy, Cat Stevens, The Carpenters—in our room. We ride bikes to the ice cream shop on the main road. I teach her how to play Spit but she never beats me. She never leaves to go to a luncheon or set up a fundraiser or at
tend a rally. When she has to fill a prescription, buy a present, or get her hair done, I go with her, like I used to go everywhere with my father. She tells me stories about her relatives, about her childhood, about books she’s read and plays she’s seen. She has all sorts of stories she’s never told me before.
One day in my grandfather’s rowboat she points to a red boathouse across the lake. “That’s where I met your father,” she says.
“Where?”
“That’s a tennis club in there. Your father was playing in a tournament. I saw him on the court and I walked slowly past the fence. He was warming up, practicing his serves. And when he went to pick up the balls, he asked me if I wanted to have an iced tea with him afterwards.”
Was it really like that then? Did you just get picked like a flower by some guy? “And you said yes?”
“No. I said I had a hair appointment. So he asked me to the movies, which was much better than an iced tea.”
“Did you like him?”
“I did. Of course I did.” She stops rowing. I think she’s looking right at me but it’s hard to tell with her sunglasses. Her bottom lip scrunches into her top one, like she’s only just realizing my full connection to the story. “He was very attractive, very funny. I can’t remember the movie we saw, but in the middle of it a couple got into twin beds and your father leaned over and said, ‘When we get married, we’re going to have a double bed.’ I was so charmed by that.” She shakes her head. “All it really takes is a few words here and there. You can hang on to a few words for a long time. Fill in the rest with the fluff of your imagination.”
She starts rowing again.
“But when did he ask you to marry him?”
“At the end of the summer. I don’t know why it happened so fast but it did back then. We were all in such a hurry. And your father was an only child. He’d just graduated from Harvard and I think he was scared of being alone.”
When Nixon resigns in August, we have to watch it up in our bedroom, on the little TV we brought from the kitchen on Myrtle Street, because my grandfather wants nothing to do with it.