But for now he has brushed his teeth and he’s back outside with the girls, who’ve plopped down cross-legged at the bushes, tugging off handfuls of currants and dropping them in bowls wedged between their bellies and knees. They’re picking at least a week late so some of the berries burst at a touch and red juice trickles down their bare arms.
“Here, Cole,” his mother instructs, and he kneels beside the girl who said she was seventeen and begins pulling berries from the branches and adding them to the bowl on her lap. She’s from New Bedford, she tells him. All the girls are from somewhere else. Girls from here are sent to Philly or Providence or Boston, which Cole already knows. Hartford’s the pits, she tells him, and in New Bedford they know how to party, so when she gets back home she’s going with Celia and Mary Beth out to the island first thing. Does he have a car? she wants to know, and he doesn’t remind her he’s fifteen, just shakes his head. She says he should call her anyway, and she wipes the juice from her hands in the grass, digs a scrap of paper and a pencil from her bag, and writes down a phone number. “Ask for Monica,” she tells him, “and be quick about it—I only got seven weeks left.”
When the bowls fill with berries he dumps them into the turkey pan and stockpots, then returns them to the girls dripping with juice to be filled again. He wonders if his mother hopes this will be a cautionary tale for him, that he’ll imagine Liz pregnant and think twice.
But if so, her tableau has the opposite effect: he thinks they’re gorgeous. He’s always been drawn to pregnant women, but that’s just it—they’re women, adults. These are girls his age, bursting with sensuality. Carnality is removed. Horny doesn’t enter the picture. Fifteen years old and he just wants to gaze at them, be near them, discover whether they smell sweeter than the girls at school. He wants to bring them lemonade, pour cool water over their feet. Years later, when Nikki’s pregnant with Daniel, he’ll love how maternity imbues her—her belly and face, her glowing skin and swollen lips. That’s also when he’ll begin to feel less sexually inclined toward her. Not, he’ll explain, because he finds her less desirable, but because the nature of his passion for her has shifted. He’ll want to care for her—God, he’ll want to worship her. Sex will feel too rough, too reckless. She’ll never believe his explanation, though. Or if she does, she won’t accept it.
“Cole could have been an altar boy,” he hears his mother tell the two girls burping babies. (He’s never considered being an altar boy.) “Father Mally asked him specifically. But we decided that with the restoration taking so much out of our weekends, it wouldn’t be possible.” The girls turn their faces toward the house—plywood nailed over a rear window, the heap of lath in the backyard waiting to be pounded and beside it the massive dump pile. “Before we go back to St. Mary’s I’ll give you the grand tour.” And he remains her theme for the rest of the afternoon: Cole is in honors English; he learned to shear sheep with eighteenth-century clippers and weave on an antique loom at Old Sturbridge Village; he builds bicycles from spare parts; he’s studying French. She emphasizes the importance of paying close attention to every detail while restoring a house. Paints from a colonial palette. Drapes and furnishings strictly period. A passion, yes, but a responsibility as well—safeguarding the house, the antiques, for those yet to come as they’ve been kept over two hundred years for us.
And slowly he gets it. She hasn’t set this up as a cautionary tale for him: she’s giving the girls a glimpse of a respectable life. And a worthy boy. Only a few hours ago her husband, unapologetic for beating her while she was pregnant, confessed that he can’t stand spending time with her, yet she’s proudly dangling this life as a model for the unwed mothers. He suspects it wasn’t a bicycle crash, as they’ve always been told, that left her with the gimpy wrist, but his father’s violence. He’s why she doesn’t play the piano anymore. On TV the abusive husband is always a mean drunk, though his father barely drinks; it’s undiluted rage. On TV the violent husband begs his good wife for forgiveness, charms her, swearing it’ll never happen again. But in their family his mother makes the declarations about never again and spends her considerable charm talking circles around the aftermath of a beating, sealing it up, providing the excuses her husband doesn’t care enough to make for himself.
* * *
—
Cole carries all the red currants into the laundry room, out of the sun, while his mother guides the girls around the house before loading them in the roasting car for the ride back to Hartford. Ian, hunched over the wheelbarrow in the hottest part of the day, is pounding lath and doesn’t look up as Cole passes by. His father has returned from a few hours at the store—he’s left it in the weekend manager’s hands—and changed out of his blazer and tie into his work clothes. He intercepts Cole in the kitchen. “We’re going to rip out the buttery today, so get yourself ready.”
A few minutes later, from the doorway, Cole watches his father widen his stance and swing the sledgehammer full-force over his shoulder, burying the rusty head in the plaster. He swings again, punching a fist-size hole in the wall and shooting out white dust that cloaks the hair on his sweaty arms. Animal hair used to be mixed into wet plaster, and Cole can see long black strands, encased for two centuries, dangling from the ragged hole. His father moves aside and Cole hooks the crowbar behind the wall and yanks on the splintered lath, popping out chunks of plaster that bust apart at his feet. Stepping onto the rubble, he tears in again, and as a cloud of dust billows off the floor his father pounds the sledge hard enough to shake the house.
They get to work, finding a rhythm with his father bashing holes between the studs and Cole prying and jerking out the lath. Years later Cole will come to know this is a stupid way to rip out plaster. A Sawzall or even better a Skilsaw with a junk blade would do the job much cleaner, and he’ll wonder if his father asked for any advice before they started. They’re in over their heads, his parents. With everything. Always struggling just to get a breath.
A minute later the small room’s thick with dust, and he breathes heavily through his nose. His father’s hair is powdered white and sweat streaks the dust down his cheeks and nose. Cole’s lips are chalky and every few minutes he sticks his head out the window for a deep breath before hawking up a ball of white spit. And again he hooks the crowbar, yanks, and explodes the plaster. When his father sets the sledgehammer down, Cole grabs it and starts swinging. He beats and smashes and pulverizes the wall—in the thrill of demolition—and when he stops to catch his breath, his mother’s standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. “You should be wearing masks.”
His father swats the plaster with the crowbar.
“Suit yourself,” she says, “but he’s going to wear one,” and wordlessly Cole slips past her and searches the toolshed until he finds a couple dirty masks hanging from a nail.
“Asinine,” she’s saying when he gets back to the buttery. “Common sense.” And rage twitches his father’s face and wrings his spine. Cole holds on to one mask and hangs the other on the doorknob but she grabs it, twirling it by the elastic on her finger. “You too,” she says.
His father eyes the mask Cole is fingering and says, “Put that on.” Then, hefting the sledgehammer, he squares his feet and, with his backswing, breaks a glass sconce off the wall. Cole’s glance darts from the shards on the floor to his father’s face and to the doorway: his mother has vanished.
Once they’ve stripped the studs, they shovel the plaster into garbage cans and toss the lath out the window. Room by room, the walls are coming down so they can add insulation. They drag the cans out to the edge of the road, then sweep and mop, coughing and spitting. The restoration has been going on for years: it’s not a process working toward completion, it’s a state. Ripped-open walls and torn-up floors, exposed wiring, a toilet drain covered up with a wastebasket, split clapboards that let mosquitoes into his bedroom in the summer and snow on windy winter nights—this is who they are.
; * * *
—
Dinner begins with the metal-on-metal scrape of the spatula gouging a cookie sheet as she serves fish sticks and tater tots, and the family eats in tense silence broken by his mother whimpering between bites, blowing her nose. A fat housefly circles his parents, scrabbles along the ceiling, and then lands on the green ribbon of fly tape hanging from the light fixture over the table.
“Maybe I should insulate the spare bedroom tomorrow,” Cole says. “Get it ready for drywall.”
The fly struggles against the sticky goo—the buzzing slowly muffled, then silenced.
* * *
—
Liz’s skin is salty with sweat. He kisses the small round scar on the right side of her neck and the larger tattered one on the left. The bullet grazed her voice box and she talked like a Munchkin for a year. It was her father’s revolver, the trigger pulled by Kirk’s friend Matt Gosling, who snuck into her parents’ bedroom and was pawing through her father’s sock drawer looking for money when he found the gun. It was an accident. Liz was roller-skating in the driveway. The bullet shot through the bedroom window and straight through her neck. She stuck an index finger in each of the holes and Kirk, who was fifteen and didn’t yet have his license, grabbed the keys off the hook on the fridge and drove her to the hospital in Hartford. Cole met her two years later and she talked about the shooting like a minor incident she barely remembered.
As the sun sets, the band of light travels up their bodies. This shed has been used to store equipment all winter, and early in the season it’s still full of tractors and setters, stacks of flats, and an old school bus painted like all the tobacco buses, the color of coffee with cream. They’ve made their lair in a heap of nets that smell of dirt and winter and Connecticut Shade.
“What’s wrong?” she says.
His body goes stiff. He never wants to tell her, but she always knows. He clears his throat—the plaster dust now settled deep in his chest.
“Are they duking it out?” she asks.
“Waiting for the inevitable.”
She rises up on an elbow. Her face pinches. “It’s not inevitable. You could stop it.”
He sighs. “I try to keep the peace.”
“You work so hard to harmonize, but it’s never enough. It doesn’t work. And anyway, do you ever tell your mother to just stop talking? I’ve heard her nagging. For a Catholic Family Services counselor with a master’s in social work”—she mocks his mother putting on airs—“you’d think she might see a pattern. It always ends the same.”
“What can I—”
“Tell her to shut up, and tell him that if he hits her again you’ll beat the piss out of him.” She sits up and punches his chest. “You have no idea of your own strength. Anyone can see you could take him. It’s just your image of him as your father that’s stopping you. You’re not seeing this objectively.” On her knees she fishes around for her underpants, then stands up and slips them over her narrow hips.
As he pulls on his T-shirt, he imagines beating the piss out of him and saving his mother. He’d pull him off of her and punch him flat on the jaw before he knew what was happening. Think fast! was how Cole’s wrestling matches with him always began since when he was little. His father might start in tickling him on the couch and then Cole—thinking fast—would jab a finger into his ribs, and pretty soon they would’ve rolled onto the floor, going at it. As a kid, his father would toy with him for a while before pinning both of his ankles to the floor with one hand and tickling him madly with the other, until Cole begged for mercy. But more recently his father has struggled to get on top and pin his shoulders with his knees and declare victory. They haven’t wrestled now in a year, he realizes. The last time—yes, it was a summer ago and they both worked up a tremendous sweat and Cole was pushing on his shoulder, trying to force him onto his back, but his father whipped his leg around and knocked him off-balance, drilling a knee into his back, and as he came in close to flip him over for the pin, Cole twisted and his elbow caught his father in the side of the head, breaking his glasses and driving the nose piece deep into his skin. His father groaned, holding his face, and for a week or more he wore the glasses taped together at the bridge, a Band-Aid running down one side of his nose. He looked like he’d been in a fight, or like an old man who’d had a growth removed, and no one said a word about it.
* * *
—
“Rabbits,” his father says, from the head of the table, thumbing through a catalog. “New Zealand Whites. Apparently they pretty much take care of business. Do everything but butcher themselves.”
Cole imagines them hopping in the grass, their soft fur and whiskers. “Butchering seems like the hard part.”
“Nope. A knife, a club, and a meat hook. That’s all it takes.”
He backs out of the kitchen. In the living room, Ian looks up at him and then returns to watching TV. In front of the fireplace his mother stands at the ironing board, spraying starch and pounding his father’s shirts with the iron. Starsky and Hutch are making a deal with a pimp to nail a lowlife who has shot a fellow officer. Music from Kelly’s stereo rattles down the stairs.
He brushes his teeth before kissing his mother goodnight, never sure how much of Liz’s scent lingers on him. She’s moved to the couch, reading a paperback, The Women’s Room. His father’s shirts hang stiff from the wrought-iron candelabra standing in the corner. “ ’Night, bro,” he says, slapping his brother’s knee, but Ian doesn’t take his eyes off the commercial: he hovers close to their mother at these tense times, head down yet watchful.
At the top of the stairs, light’s showing around his parents’ door; his father has come up to bed. A soft rap swings it partway open. “Goodnight, Dad,” he says.
“One male and three females,” he says. He’s got The Rabbit Breeder’s Guide propped up on his belly. “The docile ones you sell for pets. The mean ones you eat.”
He knocks on Kelly’s door. “What?” she calls over the music, and he pushes it open.
“Dad’s in bed,” he tells her. “You should turn your stereo down.”
She’s standing in her closet doorway, pressing out on the jamb with both hands as if trying to widen the door or, by the looks of her muscles, taut as cables, trying to bust the house apart. Isometrics—pushing one palm into the other until her face turns red, linking her fingers and pulling apart like busting out of shackles, pressing her arms and legs and the side of her head into walls. Sweat drips down her collarbone and chest, darkening her tank top. “If you knock her up,” she says, “it’ll ruin your lives.”
She doesn’t like that Liz is in her same grade—both of them sophomores—as if he’s stalking her territory. They were even made lab partners last winter, dissecting a fetal pig together. Cole smelled formaldehyde in Liz’s hair one afternoon, and later that same night he smelled it coming off his sister’s skin, here on her braided carpet, as she performed the leg lifts prescribed by the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness, her personal bible. In the lab she and Liz swabbed the tips of their ring fingers with rubbing alcohol, then jabbed each other with razor-sharp skewers, and squeezed blood onto a test strip.
“Don’t lose sleep over it,” Cole says. Not long after he and Liz started going out, her menstrual cramps became severe and her cycle irregular, and the doctor put her on the pill. A month later Cole, who’d been drawing a timeline for world history of major events from Stonehenge to the launch of Skylab, plunged into her bareback on a hot afternoon under the nets and said, “This is the most spectacular event since the Chinese invention of gunpowder in one thousand BC.”
“It’s your future,” Kelly says. “Not mine.”
And Kelly’s future is determined: her walls covered with posters of F-16s screeching across a blue sky, pilots geared up and walking badass from their jets, the Thunderbirds mid-twirl. And another, with p
hotos of Venice and Switzerland, urging her to Discover the World as a Woman in the Air Force.
“Can you hold my ankles?” she says.
He gets down on his knees while she does sit-ups. “Do you know he wants to get rabbits now?”
“Ian’ll like that,” she says. “I wish we’d get a dog.”
“The rabbits aren’t for pets.”
“Ugh.” She fires off the sit-ups like a marine. “Barbaric.”
She turned mostly vegetarian the first time they butchered chickens, and only ate meat that had no obvious connections to an animal. Pepperoni on pizza. Bacon bits on salad. Slim Jims. Getting the chickens had been her idea, inspired by a Sturbridge Village trip. Their father got on board immediately and together they designed the coop, selected the breed, and made several trips to the Agway in Southwick for supplies. Kelly imagined plump, demure birds quietly clucking around the yard, pecking at bugs and roosting serenely in the coop, laying rich, delicious eggs. She made outstanding omelets. But she was put off by the smell of twenty-five chickens right away, and when they slaughtered the roosters she bailed on the project completely. Their father took over with zeal, ordering another twenty-five day-olds and giving away eggs to everyone they knew.
“Okay,” she says, lying back on the carpet, and he releases her ankles.
“You should turn your stereo down,” he says. “I think he’s trying to sleep.”
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