“Do not say a word until I call tomorrow.”
I nodded and followed him downstairs to the basement. It might have been a regular weekend night, Peter off with friends, his guitar slung on his shoulder. He walked down the driveway to the end of the street, where a friend picked him up to take him to the bus station. By sunrise, he would be well on his way to something better than here.
The next morning, I woke up to a bright summer sun, feeling slighted and cold. Why had Peter not included me in his secret plan? My room felt empty and small, the air trapped in tiny capsules hard to inhale. But, my brother did what he promised.
Late afternoon, Peter’s telephone call from Ohio yanked Father out of his stupor.
“You better tell me what this is all about,” Father shouted on the phone.
In a minor, perverse way I was glad to hear Father raising his voice, shouting again as if he was remembering who he was, who we were. He squeezed the receiver and paced the kitchen floor listening to Peter, who had called from a gas station a thousand miles away.
“Jesus Christ. What’s Kenneth’s number? I ought to have him arrested. Does your aunt know about this? When did you come up with this scheme of yours? You call me as soon as you get there.” Father nodded idiotically, his eyes knocking around the room like trapped flies. He didn’t wait for a response. He hung up and swiped the counter top, covered in daily newspapers, onto the floor. The pages skidded toward my feet.
“Did you know about this?”
I shook my head.
As I stood at the doorway, half-paralyzed by too many emotions sinking to my feet, Father looked at me and decided that I needed to attend summer school. He didn’t want me wandering off as Peter had done.
“You are not going to hang around this house all summer, young lady. Get yourself in trouble.”
Peter was eighteen but I was still controllable at sixteen, so Father imagined.
By the end of the week I was enrolled as a day student at the academically rigorous Stonehill Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. Father insisted I attend for the entire summer. He would have signed me up as an overnight boarder but money was too tight for that. Uncle Max’s business was closing down, which meant that Mother’s inheritance no longer existed.
Sophie had gone to the Berkshires to a dance camp and Margaret was working for a hair salon. So, I was glad to go. The idea of doing nothing all summer was a numbing prospect, an added punishment for losing a mother, a family business, for losing it all. With extra credits earned, I could graduate early. I put my mind on this.
On my first day at Stonehill, a girl named Betsy James picked me up in her aquamarine, Thunderbird convertible — it was her mother’s — and sped on the highway at seventy miles an hour.
“It’s twenty-six minutes of highway,” she told me. “Twelve minutes of country. You a summer student? I go all year.”
“Yes.”
I held on to the car door handle but soon felt reassured. She drove well, with confidence. Once she turned off the highway, she slowed down and wound through old farms and wooded hills until we bounced up a dirt road, passing under evergreens and maples, to the entrance of the school. Betsy was in her last year at Stonehill. She was working as a paid intern, assisting the photography teacher.
“He’s an old man. He likes to take pictures of me. I mean, they’re creative pictures.”
Except for details about her mother’s car, how the car had 82,000 miles on it, how she had picked out new tire rims, and how she loved to drive; I couldn’t get past the surface of her. She talked as if police were chasing her words; the ends of sentences rounding sharp corners, or skidding to sudden stops. She applied and reapplied her lipstick while cruising in the passing lane. Oddly, she was pretty except for the ticking of her head — she shook her thick, long hair repeatedly as if to make sure it were still there — and the overzealous way she smiled and talked. She wore open-toed sandals and miniskirts, which she tugged and pulled as she pressed her painted toes to the gas pedal. Her shaved legs glowed with suntan lotion, filling the front seat with coconut scents. She chewed wintergreen gum.
During the ride to school, she told me that most of the students came from the New York area and many were “fucked up,” an expression I didn’t expect from her. She warned that drugs were commonplace on campus.
“You’ll see kids going into the woods. Check their eyes. Red? Glazy? Yup. They’re smoking marijuana.”
She twirled the radio dial and settled on an oldies station. Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party” shouted from the speakers.
“I don’t do drugs,” she added. “Do you?” She looked at me in a way that told me she wouldn’t approve and that I might jeopardize my ride if I did.
I shook my head.
“I mean I drink. Beer, that sort of thing,” she said.
She turned the dial again and leaned back in the seat, so that her toes tapped the top edge of the gas pedal like a ballerina en pointe.
~~~~~
On first impression, Stonehill appeared orderly and genteel. The main campus was a cluster of white clapboard buildings with green shutters — all classic New England — sewn into wrinkles on a hillside that sloped down to forest-lined fields and flattened into marsh-land. Summer students stayed in the newer and plainer brick dorms down the hill from the center quadrangle. The campus acreage included tennis courts, a photography studio, and two soccer fields.
Betsy parked in a grassy lot and left me to make my way to the dining hall where seventy-five students gathered for introductions. The glass-enclosed room smelled of varnished tables and chairs warmed by the sun. The pine floors glowed with new wax.
A woman with short hair and a suit greeted me at the door. She fished out my name tag from her folder. Each tag had an assigned table number. I sat at table six, next to a boy named Gregory Brown. He looked older because of his dark beard. He was lanky, his shirt loose on his bones. He wore a white, button-down shirt, rolled up to his elbows, revealing more dark hair on his arms. His shirttail hung over well-worn jeans.
Instead of saying hello, he immediately informed me that he had flunked French, and that it was his father, an attorney, who insisted he come to Stonehill. Gregory was from Scarsdale, New York.
“At the moment I’m my dad’s failure but this could change.” He winked when he said this, which immediately dismantled his intense appearance. His voice was friendly and sunny like a clarinet, musical but not overpowering. He smiled wistfully, as if the horror of spending a summer at this toney, New England private school was something he could tolerate just as he had put up with everything else in his life: with a smudge of irony. His red lips looked sunburned next to his beard.
“Foreign languages just aren’t my forte. It happens to the best of us.”
“I can help you if you want,” I said.
“Deal. You can start now.” He smiled in that appealing way again, his eyes both piercing and sleepy. “You fail anything?”
“No.”
Mrs. Corey, the woman at the door, introduced herself as the headmistress. She had a stern face and wide forehead.
“Follow the rules and your time here will be a pleasant experience for all. There’s always one or two who don’t and for those I can promise you there will be stiff consequences. Any questions or concerns, I’m here to answer them. Have a good semester. Study hard.” She smiled, but smiling did not become her. She gestured for us to head on to our first class.
It turned out that Gregory and I were the only two students taking advanced French, which is probably why we had been assigned to sit together at table six. In the classroom, we sat at a long wooden table in a room with tall windows and dusty wood floors, flanking Madame Fallon who initially looked old enough to retire but whose quick-eyed, energetic personality made me forget her age. She wore a long, pleated skirt and a pink shirt with round collar. Her perfume had strains of mothballs and honey.
The class lasted the morning. Gregory and I took turns reading o
ut loud from a textbook. Gregory spoke softly, often mumbling, which drove Madame Fallon to stand up behind him and unhunch his broad, bony shoulders. She often asked me to repeat what he tried to say.
At the end of class I waited for him to put his book in his knapsack. I carried my text in my arms. He opened his camera and checked the settings, then lifted it up and took his first picture of me.
“I’m not stupid, you know. Ask me about anything else, just not French.”
I laughed. “Ok.” I had yet to meet someone my age who wasn’t trying hard to be someone else, except for Gregory.
“History is a subject I can handle.”
I made a face. It was my least favorite subject.
“Hold on,” he said. “Here’s what’s interesting about it. You can’t go by those facts they teach you. Historians skewer the facts.” He made a twisting motion with his arm. “Did you know that?”
I shrugged. “No.”
“Yep. Depending on their political or religious or economical perspective, but that’s the fun part, interpreting perceptions, determining the historian’s persuasion.”
“I never understood it like that. Anyway, it’s never about women.” The textbooks I read in school rarely featured women, except for Betsy Ross types — flag sewers and pie makers — and the men seemed stiffer than dead animals. “I don’t believe in history,” I said. “What’s the point? It’s the present that matters.”
During lunch, we kept our debate going about history’s value — or nonvalue — as I saw it. It was so much fun we agreed to meet up again during free period at the end of the day. Stonehill might turn out okay, I thought.
I took a literature class where we read The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco. A dozen of us, including Gregory, sat around a conference table in the library. In this play, the main characters talked in non sequiturs. No one made any sense but I liked this about the play. To me, the disconnection in the language, the odd behavior between adults, made perfect sense to me, reflecting that impenetrable world of my father and mother I so often witnessed, living in separate spheres, joined only by drinks and lighted cigarettes. But the play angered some of the students. They thought it stupid, a waste of time. I didn’t think so.
When free time came, some students played tennis. Others read under oak trees or grouped together on the lawn or snuck cigarettes. Others went to their rooms or for walks. Since Gregory was a boarder, he wanted to explore the campus. We crossed the soccer field and walked into a dense border of trees toward the marshy area. The sun was hot and dry. A breeze kept the bugs away. We sat under a stand of mature pines and Gregory took more pictures of me. He explained that a group of his photos, portraits of old people from his town, hung in the town’s main library.
“My father wasn’t impressed.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Maybe he thinks I’m gay.” He lifted his camera. “You’re very beautiful.”
I looked into his lens and began singing the refrain to “Aquarius.” The song flew out of my mouth like a surprised bird. I looked up at the sky, through an opening in the trees. The wide spaces looked back approvingly. “When the moon is in the seventh hour.” I kept singing and then stopped and said: “Did you ever wonder what that means?” I felt happy suddenly, unleashed for the first time all year.
I swooped my arms up, singing: “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”
“You’ve a voice for the world,” he said, leaning toward me. He stroked my lips with his fingers, as if touching a photograph, then kissed me gently pressing his lips to my nose, then my cheek, then finally my lips, opening his mouth and offering his tongue, at first uncertain, waiting for encouragement. I gave him my tongue in response, and leaned toward him until my breasts touched his chest. He rested his hand on my knee and our kissing grew more urgent. He slid his fingers under my skirt touching skin beneath my under-pants. The sensation was absolutely liberating, as if I had awakened to a place that offered my very own secret getaway. Waves of summer wind and the smell of pine melted in my brain.
In the Thunderbird on the way home, the wind tangled my hair and covered my face from whatever lingered from Gregory’s kisses. Betsy, so enamored with herself in the mirror, failed to notice my distracted voice, the disorientation I felt inside my limbs.
At home, I ran upstairs to change into shorts. Elliot and Robert were outside playing on the old swing set in the backyard. With Mother gone, and now Peter, who had started playing at beach coffeehouses in California, the house felt bigger, emptier in the shadow of my changing world. The air inside smelled unlived in, the way I imagined Mrs. Brenwald’s house might smell. Next door, a grocery boy continued to deliver her bags of food on Saturdays. Occasionally, I still saw her curtains rustling in the windows.
In my bedroom, I could hear squeaking from rusty chains as my brothers flew back and forth into the sky. Robert loved the swings and could spend hours, it seemed, cutting a sharp arc into the summer air. The pendulum calmed his overactive mind.
I looked out my window to the yard. Two stories below, Mother’s roses bloomed haphazardly while some wilted. Father had no sense about plants and no one, including me, knew what to do with her thorny bushes. To approach them meant approaching her and that spooked me. As a result, the flowerbeds lost all sense of order, became overgrown and weed ridden. Tall stalks of unwanted shoots took over, robust and vengeful, to make up for all those summer days Mother patiently clipped, snipped, weeded, shaped the spiky growth until the garden obeyed and responded with a stunning mélange of color and perfume. Not anymore. The wild animals had been loosed from their cages.
~~~~~
When I came down for dinner, Dora called me into the kitchen and there I found the kitchen counter with only three place settings not four.
“What’s this?”
“Your father is out tonight.”
She made a disapproving look to let me know that he was with Miss Delgarno, then she turned back to the sink to wash dishes.
I didn’t pursue this. I didn’t want to know more. If Peter could escape to California, so could I, in my own way.
I sat down and unfolded the newspaper, flicking past headlines on Vietnam, Nixon and economic recession, to the comics section. The world of comics completely satisfied. Problems remained contained. Life was something you could laugh at. Inside the squares, characters revisited the same woes day after day. They performed for me. Charlie Brown was a favorite. He tried relentlessly and hopelessly to lift his spirits; yet, week after week, he grew despondent while his classmate, Lucy, screamed, ranted, even hit him at times, without accruing results. No matter what unpleasant events occurred in the world, Charlie’s depressed yet searching personality lived on. I could rely on him.
Dora plunked three paper napkins onto the counter and helped Elliot and Robert settle in with cold tuna sandwiches and glasses of milk. Next to my two younger brothers, I sat taller, my body no longer a child’s. Dora fussed over them, insisting that they eat, nudging them to drink up, promising ice cream for dessert if they obeyed her. But at the kitchen counter, the rules of etiquette changed. Robert read while he ate. He had finished his series and was onto another. All his fantasy books came in groups of three or more as if to put off endings. Elliot fiddled with a pocketful of small, plastic horses, lining them next to his plate, talking to them. I tried to listen to what he said, but it was hard to follow. It was as if he were in the middle of a much longer discussion. I started filling in the crossword puzzle.
After dinner, I went up to Peter’s room to play records and sing. I played Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” over and over and Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown” and Laura Nyro’s “Timer.” I missed him. These well-worn melodies we listened to on so many nights brought him back, made his presence palatable. Sometimes, my house felt raw like a broken blister.
“I like the one about ice cream,” Elliot said in the doorway.
“Come sit down,” I said. “And ice cream castles in the air
— ”
I sang Joni Mitchell’s words again and he came in and went over to the record player, lingering as if my singing might bring Peter back to his world, too.
“When is Peter coming home?”
“Maybe after the summer, I don’t know.”
Tonight he looked older, less inward. Maybe he had grown a little. I knew he was asking why Peter had left us. He probably wondered if I would be next.
“Peter’s older. All his friends went someplace this summer.”
“I know. I want to go to Australia when I grow up.”
I laughed. “That’s far. I would miss you.”
“You’ll come and visit.”
“Okay. I will.” I pulled him over and hugged him.
“I think she’ll be happy with Dad. Sherry’s nice,” he said.
“She’s okay.”
Once again, I was thrown off kilter by his foresight. Elliot knew things; he knew that Sherry might shape his life more than mine. But I tightened up when he said this, and turned to the record player, which had stopped, to flip the record over.
“You want to hear that one again?” I asked him. I poised the needle over the vinyl and lowered it until the diamond point touched the wide, dividing groove.
~~~~~
Later, I lay in bed thinking of Gregory and his hands touching me. My room dissolved into a glen of trees. I could think of nothing else. I rubbed my fingers between my thighs as he did until the melting in my brain returned and the feeling of diving into a warm pool filled my chest. The house grew silent and remained silent. Dora’s television shut off. The dishwasher’s cycle complete. I stopped waiting for Father to come home.
The next morning Father stood over the kitchen sink distracted again, sucking on slices of oranges, spitting out seeds into the drain. Dora moved stolidly about the kitchen, a muscular presence carving a triangular pattern on the linoleum floor between the refrigerator, sink and counter. She wrapped lunch sandwiches for my brothers; tempered the gas flame on the stove to keep Father’s coffee from boiling over. She moved impatiently.
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