Her suitcase opened with a click, and the sharp, sour smell of cigarette smoke wafted into the room. It made my nose itch.
I was surprised to see the suitcase was packed solid with clothes. I had struggled carrying it to her room, thinking she must have brought books, the heavy, leather-bound kind. I had even daydreamed a little about reading together in front of the fireplace in the dining room on rainy afternoons. Maybe we would take turns reading aloud. Maybe she would introduce me to new authors.
Gwendolyn — Gwen — hummed as she unpacked, sashaying between the suitcase and the closet, holding clothes against her before smoothing them out and slipping them on hangers. Sometimes she sang a lyric or two. Most of them I didn’t recognize. She didn’t seem to mind that Scarlett and I were just sitting there, watching her unpack and listening to her sing. I wondered if all dancers were like that, carrying a tune and a rhythm wherever they went, ready to burst into song and dance at a moment’s notice.
“I sure could use some music,” Gwen said suddenly, as if she was completely unaware that she herself had been singing this whole time. “Is there a record player in here?”
“No,” I said. “But there’s one in the dining hall.”
“What about a radio?”
“Guests usually bring their own, but there’s one in the office and in the kitchen.”
“And in the messy hall,” Scarlett added.
“The mess hall,” I corrected. “There’s a record player there, too. That’s where you’ll be teaching dance. I can take you there, if you like. When you’re done unpacking.”
“Isn’t a mess hall an army thing?” Gwen asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Here it’s where we have games on rainy days. And now dances,” I added. “I’m really excited about dance lessons. I think a lot of our guests will be.”
“Great,” Gwen said absently, using her teeth to break off a stray thread from the skinniest pair of pedal pushers I had ever seen.
“Do you remember me?” Scarlett asked.
Gwen smiled, but looked tired. “Yes,” she sighed. “You were a cute little thing.”
Scarlett looked pleased, then frowned. “I don’t remember you,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “You were just a baby,” I reminded her.
“But I remember Lieutenant Jesse.”
“You do not, you just think you do.”
“Do so!”
Gwen snorted. “Lieutenant Jesse? Who’s that?” she asked. “Your dad’s war buddy?”
“Lieutenant Jesse was our dog,” I explained. “He died when Scarlett was three, but she claims to remember him.”
“I do,” Scarlett insisted. “He was all black and he used to walk beside me on the dunes so I didn’t fall.”
“Is that true?” Gwen asked me.
“Yes,” I admitted. “But we told you about that, Scarlett. That’s not the same thing as remembering it yourself.”
“But I do remember it myself.”
This was an argument that could go on forever. Gwen must have picked up on this, because she changed the subject, asking, “Why did you call him Lieutenant Jesse?”
“Mimi named him Jesse after someone in a play she saw, and Bo added the lieutenant part because he was obsessed with the war. He put lieutenant or captain in front of everything. He used to call Daddy ‘Captain Dad,’” I explained.
Gwen rolled her eyes and grinned at me. I felt electrified.
“Boys,” she said.
I grinned back and repeated, “Boys.”
“Where is that brother of yours? The last time I saw him I showed him a thing or two about racing.”
My heart leapt. So she did remember!
“He’s supposed to be mowing the lawn,” Scarlett said.
“But he’s probably out fishing or messing around with his band,” I finished.
Gwen perked up. “What kind of band?”
“Oh, they play all sorts of music,” I said vaguely. The truth was I didn’t know. Bo didn’t consider me important enough to talk to about his band. Music was something that teenagers did, and even though I was technically a teenager, Bo didn’t seem to think thirteen counted.
Out of the blue, Scarlett asked, “How come you didn’t come back to visit us?”
“Scarlett, that’s personal!” I scolded, smiling ruefully at Gwen, as if to say, What can you do?
I was embarrassed, but also a little jealous. Scarlett asked all the questions I wanted to know the answers to, but felt forbidden to ask. But my little sister had not yet reached the age where nosiness ceases to be cute and instead becomes a character flaw.
Gwen snorted again. “I wasn’t invited.”
“That’s not true,” I said, my face growing hot. “Of course you were invited!”
Gwen shrugged and slammed her suitcase closed, shoving it under the bed. “Well, then I guess the invitation got lost in the mail.”
“You went to ballet school, you didn’t have the time,” I reminded her.
“It wasn’t jail or anything,” she said. “They gave us summers off. Although sometimes it felt like we were being punished. Look!”
Gwen sat down, swung her long legs on to the bed and displayed her feet for us to examine. Scarlett gasped. They were grey and misshapen, like troll’s feet, covered in rough calluses and dried scabs. Her toes were painted candy-apple red, which made them seem that much more grotesque. I couldn’t imagine them fitting into dainty ballet slippers, pink and pearly as the inside of a shell. I thought of my own feet, slim and brown and buffed smooth by the sand, and felt ill. Scarlett, however, was fascinated.
“Can I touch them?” she asked.
Gwen wiggled her toes. “Be my guest.”
Tentatively, Scarlett poked at a particularly large callus running the length of Gwen’s big toe.
“Ugh!” she cried, shuddering. “That’s disgusting!”
“You should see the state of my nails,” Gwen sighed. “That’s why I always keep ’em nice and red.”
“Will you paint my toenails?” Scarlett asked.
“Sure, if it’s okay with your mom. The last thing I need is for someone else’s mother to go all Mama Bear on me.” Gwen dug around in an oversized pink plastic makeup case.
“Mimi won’t mind,” Scarlett assured her. “She loves makeup. She doesn’t have much of it anymore, because she says it doesn’t keep in the heat and the sand gets into it.”
“I can do yours, too, Reenie, if you like.”
“Maybe later,” I said, suddenly shy.
“Suit yourself. Aha! Here we go!”
Gwen held up a small bottle of the same candy-apple red polish that tipped her own toes. She rolled it between her palms, which were smooth and white and so unlike her ruined feet.
“This keeps the air bubbles out,” she explained to Scarlett.
I turned and left the room silently. All the visions I’d had of Gwendolyn and I bonding over books and late night discussions were disappearing as quickly as cotton candy on the tongue. Or, at the very least, I was being replaced by my own little sister. Just as well. If I was too old to blurt out the questions I wanted to know the answers to, I was probably too old to have someone paint my toenails.
Gwen
Gwen spent all of Monday and Tuesday in her room. I had no idea what she was doing, because not one of us disturbed her. We knew she was alive, because Scarlett and I had smelled smoke and watched from below her window as a pale arm appeared, a red-tipped cigarette dangling from lazy fingers. Everyone talked in whispers and avoided the guest room altogether, as if it held a dying invalid instead of our new dance teacher. Everyone except Scarlett, who found all sorts of reasons to walk by Gwen’s room, humming softly, pausing to knock and ask if she needed anything: dinner, towels, shampoo, a swim. Each time she was met with silence.
When Gwen didn’t show up for dinner for the third night in a row, Daddy let his irritation be known. Mimi told him to let her be.
“She obviousl
y needs her sleep,” Mimi said.
“I need my sleep — doesn’t mean I get to lie around all day,” Bo muttered.
“She’s our guest,” Mimi insisted.
“That may be, Dorrie, but she’s also supposed to be working for us,” Daddy said gently.
“Give her a few more days, Frank. She just got here.”
Daddy sighed, throwing up his arms. “All right, this is your project, Dorrie. I’ll leave it to you. But the girl has to eat sometime.”
But Gwen had been eating; I knew this because I had seen her. Late Sunday night I’d heard a door open and a stair creak. I knew it couldn’t be Bo or Scarlett, because we all knew which stairs to avoid when we were trying to get someplace secretly. Besides, Bo was still sneaking out through his window and across the roof. I suspected he was off meeting with shady members of his band, or else charming girls with his guitar at parties I would never be invited to.
So it had to be Gwen creeping through the halls.
I counted to ten before getting up and heading downstairs myself, veering toward the kitchen — why else would she sneak out in the middle of the night, if not for a midnight snack? I slipped from shadow to shadow, knowing the particular blackness of the lodge like the back of my hand, and watched as Gwen picked through the contents of Elsa’s well-stocked fridge.
She was a disgusting eater, smothering a devilled egg with a heavy dollop of relish and sticking her fingers in the jam jar, sucking off Elsa’s strawberry preserves. She took two bites out of a tomato, biting into it like an apple, before tossing it in the garbage. I had half a mind to speak out right there. Those are Elsa’s tomatoes, I wanted to say. She brings them from her garden. How dare you throw them away! But then I saw her eyes. Even in the eerie glow from the refrigerator I could see how swollen they were, the edges red and raw looking. It was obvious Gwen had been crying. But why?
When she showed up at breakfast Wednesday morning, no one let on that her presence was out of the ordinary. Everyone acted like she had been sitting down to toast and oatmeal with us for days. Even Scarlett managed to keep her surprise in check, though she had cooled to Gwen after her efforts to lure her from her room. Daddy was already in the office and Mimi poured Gwen a cup of coffee without asking, as if it were an everyday thing.
“Good morning, Gwendolyn.”
“It’s Gwen.”
“Silly me. I keep forgetting. It’s just that I’ve thought of you as Gwendolyn for all these years …”
“Feeling rested?” Bo said lightly.
Mimi sat up a little straighter, her mouth flattening into a line. Bo pretended not to see this and kept smiling at Gwen.
“Yes, thank you,” Gwen said evenly. “Must be all this fresh air.”
“Just wait till you get outside,” Bo said dryly. “You may never wake up again.”
“Actually, I did have a little trouble getting to sleep some nights,” Gwen said.
Mimi looked worried. “Were you too hot?” she asked.
Gwen shook her head. “No, that’s not it. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I swear I heard footsteps on the roof.”
Gwen stared right at Bo. Now he was the one who looked worried. I had to swallow a smile. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had heard him sneak out.
“It’s probably just squirrels,” Bo said, staring right back at her.
Gwen smiled at him, then at Mimi. “Probably. You must have big squirrels up here.”
“Huge,” Bo said, getting up to leave.
If Gwen was going to rat Bo out, it wasn’t going to be today. She refused offers of toast or oatmeal and instead nursed her coffee, smiling and nodding as Mimi fretted about the squirrels. I finished my breakfast but hung around the table, hoping to be invited to whatever Gwen had planned for the day. When she drained the last of her coffee, Mimi smiled and stood up.
“Now, let me get my sunglasses, and I’d be happy to give you a quick tour, help you get reacquainted with Sandy Shores.”
My heart sank. I had been hoping to give Gwen the tour, like I had so many years before. Entertainment may have been Mimi’s project, but tours were my specialty. As luck would have it, Elsa popped out from the kitchen. “Excuse me, Mrs. Starr, but we’re short butter and eggs and we’ve got chicken and waffles on the menu for tonight.”
Mimi sighed. “Where’s your father?” she asked me.
I shrugged, secretly crossing my fingers behind my back and hoping against hope that she’d see to the groceries and leave the tour to me.
“Fine. I’ll go, Elsa. I’m sorry, Gwendolyn, but duty calls. It’s always something around here! I’ll let Reenie show you around. She’s our best tour guide anyway,” Mimi said, laying a hand on my head. I squirmed away from her touch. I knew she meant it as a compliment but I couldn’t help feeling like a pet, some kind of trained guide dog. Gwen shrugged with one shoulder.
“Sure,” she said, turning her gaze on me. It was the first time she had really looked at me this morning. I noticed that her eyes were still blue, and they had a glint of mischievousness that I remembered from a few summers ago. “Lead on.”
The Race, 1956
The first time I gave Gwen a tour was in 1956.
After years, my mother had convinced her best friend Grace to come visit, and she was bringing Gwendolyn. I couldn’t wait for a new playmate, as Bo was already abandoning me and running off to play with older boys.
When she arrived at Sandy Shores, blinking in the semi-darkness of the foyer in the lodge, Gwen was exactly how I pictured a fairy princess to look: long and thin like a reed, with hair so pale it looked white. Everything about her was silvery: pale arms, light blue eyes, pearly fingernails. Her mother insisted we call her Gwendolyn, which felt as rich and exotic as Turkish delight on my tongue, a foreign candy I had never tasted but had read about in books.
I took great care to show off the best parts of Sandy Shores, all the secret parts that I knew as well as the freckles on my knee. I showed her the robin’s nest nestled in the eaves of the old boathouse and pointed out every gopher’s hole I knew. Despite my best efforts, including my funniest stories and as many Sandy Shores facts that I could remember, I barely got a single word from her. I told her about the progress I was making with my swimming. Like the rest of Canada, I was in love with Marilyn Bell, and I felt certain that in a few years I could beat her record and become the youngest Canadian to cross the English Channel. Surely someone who had been born only a few feet from a lake was destined to be a great swimmer.
Bo, who had been loitering around looking for frogs, offered a challenge. “Hey Weenie, I’ll bet you a week’s chores you can’t beat me to the raft and back.”
It was a mean dare and Bo knew it. The raft, a number of smooth old logs roped together and anchored to the lake bed, was at least thirty feet from the beach. I was a good swimmer and had made it to the raft many times, but Bo was three years older; there was no way I would win. I was used to this kind of unfair treatment from Bo, and I was prepared to kick up a fuss, until Gwendolyn spoke up.
“I’ll race for you, Reenie.”
Bo and I stared at her. I don’t know what surprised me more, the sound of her voice or the fact that she was offering to swim in my place.
“You?” Bo said.
Gwendolyn shrugged her narrow shoulders. They were so thin and pointy, I imagined she had a closet full of blouses and sweaters with holes in the shoulders.
“Why not? Afraid of losing to a girl?” Gwendolyn’s lip twitched, and it occurred to me that she was trying not to smile.
Bo grinned with the smug confidence of a person who knows he’s about to be proven right, and said, “Sure. Weenie, you give us the go-ahead.”
Bo ran off toward the edge of the beach, his heels kicking up sand in our faces. I was nervous. Gwendolyn may have been older than Bo, but she looked like she was made of ropes; the thin kind.
“Boys are such show-offs,” she said to me as we made our way over the sand dunes to the beach. “Do
n’t worry. I’ve been taking lessons at the pool.”
Gwendolyn peeled layers of clothing off one at a time, handing them to me for safekeeping. They were warm from her skin and smelled faintly of soap. I held them close to my chest, vowing silently to keep them out of the sand and the grass until she finished the race.
“Terms are the same. If I win, Reenie still has to do all of my chores.”
Gwen nodded. “But if I win, you have to do all of Reenie’s chores and serve her breakfast every morning for a week.”
Bo didn’t even hesitate. He was that sure he would win. “Deal.”
Bo spit into his hand and offered it to Gwendolyn, grinning. I gasped. The nerve! This was something I had seen Bo do all the time with his friends, but not, at least to my knowledge, with a girl; especially a city girl like Gwendolyn. But Gwendolyn spit wholeheartedly into her own palm and slapped it against Bo’s, shaking vigorously. I giggled.
“Deal,” she repeated. If it bothered her to have Bo’s spit all over her hand, you sure couldn’t tell by the way she was grinning. I wondered if, finally, Bo was about to meet his match. And better yet, in a girl!
Gwendolyn took her place in the sand next to Bo, leaning over, hands on the ground like a runner before a race. Her hair fell over her face like a curtain of moonlight. I felt a rush of pride for my beautiful, unlikely champion.
“On your marks, get set, go!”
Bo and Gwendolyn tore into the water, Bo yelling a war cry the whole way, Gwendolyn loping like a mystical white unicorn.
I jumped and cheered as well as I could, holding an armful of clothing. It was after lunch and the sun was high in the sky, making it difficult to see. I squinted into the white glare of the afternoon as they disappeared into the water, sending up beads of water like diamonds in their wake. From my vantage point it was hard to tell who was in the lead. With her silvery hair wet and plastered to her skull, Gwendolyn looked less like a fairy princess and more like a seal, bobbing up between the waves every once in a while for air. It endeared her to me even more.
Summer Days, Starry Nights Page 5