Take Me Back

by Sally Mandel

  Lily Adams didn’t learn to drive until after Stella was born. Having grown up in a series of foreign cities with missionary parents who never considered an automobile license a priority for their daughter, she was uneasy behind the wheel and somewhat inept. Stella braced herself now, on their way to the country club, as their tires dug briefly into the shoulder on the right. She couldn’t wait to get her learner’s permit. She already knew how to drive the car up and down their driveway, but by now that had grown pretty tiresome.

  It had puzzled some of their wealthy friends when William and Lily had opted to join the local club rather than the more exclusive one over in New Hartford. William’s father, after all, and then William himself, had headed the prosperous furniture company that his father had founded, the firm that employed most of the town. Furthermore, the local golf course had only nine holes and its tennis courts were weedy. Worst of all, there was a large dairy farm directly across Route 48. Sometimes, when the wind was right, the heady scent of cows floated directly onto the clubhouse patio. Still, Lily and William enjoyed the inclusiveness of the membership there that ranged from the mail clerk at Adams Manufacturing Limited to the mayor himself.

  “With this kid around, I guess Dad won’t be able to play tennis with me,” Stella grumbled as they shuddered their way up the long bumpy road to the clubhouse. There was no point in even waiting for a response. Her mother didn’t like to talk while she was driving for fear of losing her concentration. “I suppose we can do a round-robin,” Stella murmured.

  The new boy and Stella’s father were already sitting at a table when Stella and Lily entered the dining room. Lily was effortlessly elegant, as always, in a pale coral sweater that flattered her fine skin and chestnut hair. Stella had yanked on her one skirt and a cotton blouse with pictures of buffaloes stenciled down the front. She had traded a friend for it, getting rid of a preppy pink shirt that annoyed her. Stella’s concept of fashion had always been somewhat unorthodox. As a three-year-old, she insisted upon wearing her favorite pajamas to nursery school. She was a willful child, so Lily had simply sighed, deciding that this was not a battle worthy of engagement. As long as she was clean and warm, what did it matter?

  William was deep into a conversation with the boy. Lily touched her husband’s shoulder, and when he turned to her the expression on his handsome, weathered face changed as if someone had just told him he won the lottery. “Lily,” he said. “Here’s our Simon. Stella, this is Simon Vanderwall.”

  Stella had already extended her hand in the way she had of stretching out to greet the world. She sat across from Simon and gazed at him, looking into his face for tragedy and finding none.

  “How was your golf lesson?” William asked.

  “It’s tomorrow after school,” Stella said.

  “Stella’s a real natural,” he explained to Simon. Stella ducked her head, embarrassed. Her father loved to find an excuse to bring up her athletic prowess. “But she doesn’t much bother to practice.”

  Stella bet he remembered perfectly well when her lesson was, and bet he just pretended he thought it was today so that he could brag to the new boy. She didn’t even like golf. It was much too slow for her, all that standing around before you even got a chance to finally swing at the ball. She far preferred tennis.

  “Simon, it must be a little strange for you here,” Lily said. “You have so many attachments to America through your father, I know, but it can’t feel much like home.”

  Stella watched the boy’s face as he fastened his eyes on her mother, clearly moved by her sensitivity and grateful for it. Stella had seen the same phenomenon a hundred times. Her mother, she decided, saw directly into people’s hearts and then would choose the perfect words to offer comfort. The only exception was Stella, who seemed to baffle everyone, including her mother and certainly herself.

  “I used to spend summers at my grandparents’ in Nebraska,” Simon said, “but, yes, mostly it seems like home is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.”

  “I hope you’ll come to us often while you’re here,” Lily said, and winked at him. “I have stories to tell you about your mother.”

  As usual, people began to stop by at their table: the Comptons with their two children, one as nasty as the other was adorable; the doctor, a widower, who had delivered Stella; the company’s head of sales, whose ruddy complexion hinted at high blood pressure. It was always like this, people paying their respects to the royal family. Stella thought she might scream. She folded and refolded her napkin. There was something forced about her father’s congeniality today, she thought, glancing at the empty martini glass on the table in front of him. At lunch? Sure, there were always cocktails before dinner, and maybe a glass or two of wine, but she had never seen him drink at this hour.

  “What are you taking at the college?” she asked Simon.

  He turned his gray eyes on her and she felt a funny sensation in her stomach, like a guitar string bring plucked. “Twentieth century American lit and Shakespeare’s comedies,” he answered.

  “You came all the way over here for Shakespeare?” Stella asked.

  “Sure,” he answered. “Why, don’t you like him?”

  “Oh, I’m too young for that stuff,” she said. “And probably too dumb.” She could have stabbed herself with the salad fork. She really liked the way he wore his hair, shaggy and long enough to brush the collar of his shirt.

  “I really doubt that,” Simon said and gave her a smile. Oh, there it was, she saw now, the sadness. That smile was sincere, all right, but filtered through a broken heart. She felt like reaching across the table and taking his hand. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that her father had somehow procured another martini and had swallowed most of it. She knew he was angry at her grandfather, as usual, for interfering at the company. For several weeks, he’d been blowing up over stupid things. Just the other day, he broke another tennis racquet after a bad shot and yelled at her mother because his pants had come back from the cleaners with the crease in the wrong place. Stella wanted to slug him when he hurt her mother.

  They made their trips to the buffet table, and as Stella, Lily and Simon chatted, William continued to drink. He was conversing plenty, just not with them, craning his neck over to the next table instead.

  “You’re not addressing the ball properly!” he lectured the school superintendent. “I was watching you just this morning! You know what’ll help? Square dancing! I’m not kidding!”

  Stella felt a flush creep up her neck and flood her cheeks. Her father was practically shouting. People were turning to look at him.

  “Waiter!” he called, and plucked at the sleeve of a passing busboy. “Martini. Two olives.”

  Lily touched his arm. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough, William?” she asked.

  He barely broke stride. “There’s a square dance at the Legion on Monday nights!”

  Please, God, Stella thought. Make him stop shouting. Lily laid her hand on his. He shook it off and glared at her. “Don’t manage me, Lily,” he snapped, and turned back to the superintendent.

  “Check out that dance!” William bellowed. “Can’t tell you how it works, but there’s something about balance. And it wouldn’t hurt to lose some weight!”

  The man and his wife bobbed their heads with the stunned look of trapped animals when the cage door clangs shut. Stella wadded her napkin into a tortured ball on her lap. He was drunk. Her father was drunk. She’d only seen one person inebriated in her life, that horrible Mrs. Brickles who would get out on the dance floor by herself and writhe around like a stripper and try to sing with the band even though she could never remember the words. How could Stella go back to school and face the superintendent in the hallway? Stella looked at her mother. Do something, she thought. Make him stop. Make him sober. Make him go away. But Lily, her face ashen, could only stare at William like everyone else.

  “I propose a toast to the new regime!” William shouted, stagge
ring to his feet. “To International Furnishers, I-N-C, cretins and infidels, long may they reign!” He drained his glass, then hurled it to the floor where it shattered loudly. His knees buckled as he attempted to sit. Stella saw what was coming. She put her hands to her head and whispered, “No ….”

  The chair skidded out from under William as he crashed to the floor. His legs flailed in the air a moment, cartoonlike, revealing his socks and several inches of bare leg. And then it was over. There was immediate and profound silence, as if one of those remote controls had suddenly clicked on mute. Finally, after what seemed an eternity to Stella, the occupants of the nearby tables went to help Lily lift her father up. Stella fled.

  She locked herself in the last stall of the ladies’ room and wept with great heaving sobs. She felt, when she cried like this, as if she were on the ocean in a tempest, forty-foot waves sweeping her up where she hung suspended, gasping, only to be flung down again into the trough below. After a while, there was a knock on the door. Stella saw Lily Adams’ shoes outside the stall. They were spectator pumps, not a scuff mark on them, lined up side by side, as if her mother were standing at attention.

  “Stella,” Lily commanded. “Open the door.”

  “I wish he would die!” Stella shot back even as the wave swept her up. She took a deep shuddering breath, then howled as she plummeted down again. “I hate him! I hate him to death!”

  “Open the door this instant,” Lily said. “Don’t force me to fetch Mr. Davis to get you out.”

  The door slowly swung open, but Stella remained inside, slumped forward on the lid of the toilet seat, still sobbing.

  Lily took her by the shoulders. “You have to get control of yourself. Now calm down, Stella. Right now.”

  “You just sat there watching him get drunk,” Stella said, her words punctuated by gulps. “Everyone saw him fall on his butt. And that new boy …” She buried her face in her hands.

  “I don’t know how to talk to you when you’re like this,” Lily said. “It can’t be good for you, these hysterics.”

  Stella had been hearing this all her life. Her mother never shouted, hardly ever raised her voice. “Don’t you have any feelings, Mama? Didn’t you feel humiliated right there in front of everybody? In front of Simon?”

  Lily’s eyes closed, and for just a moment a deep line appeared between her brows. Now I’ve hurt her, Stella thought. I’m horrible. A horrible daughter with a horrible father. She leapt up and pushed her way past Lily, felt the futile brush of her mother’s fingers on her arm and then she was out of there, dashing down the hallway with its portraits of local golf champions and its subtle smell of carpet mold and Sunday cooking.

  By the front door stood a figure silhouetted against the sunshine with his back to her, hands in pockets. Stella would have to get past him and dreaded speaking to anyone. Having heard her approach, the figure turned around. It was Simon Vanderwall.

  “Oh, no!” Stella cried out.

  She tried to slip around him, but he grabbed her arm. She looked at him with tears pouring down her cheeks. His face floated in front of her. It seemed a portrait of grief. He had lost his brother, she remembered.

  As for her little Sunday brunch tragedy? Her father had made a fool of himself, that was all. Nobody had died. She was so ashamed. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s no big deal?” she asked Simon.

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Stella said. She couldn’t help it. She was still on the ocean, at the mercy of the storm.

  “Is there anywhere you can go?” Simon asked. He had kept his hand wrapped around her upper arm.

  Those fingers felt good. “Yes,” she said finally. “I do have a place.”

  “Would you like me to go with you?”

  She looked out across the parking lot where rows of cars baked in the sun, their colors reflecting painfully into her swollen eyes. “Okay,” she said. “If you can stand me.”

  Parson’s Creek, a half-mile hike from the country club, divided two counties of rural upstate New York that rose gently northward from the wide valley along the Mohawk River. Beginning in what was little more than a large puddle atop a glacial ridge, it gathered volume as it flowed downhill joined by other springs and streams of runoff, cascading over sheer rock and meandering through cow pastures. The gulch, as it was known, was a wooded stretch where the creek had carved through sediment and clay, a sanctuary with pristine water eddying between flat sun-warmed rocks. There had been an effort two years ago to buy up some land creekside for development, put to rest only when it was determined that annual spring floods would render the plan impractical. Stella was so relieved. She was profoundly attached to the countryside around Indian Wells, and felt particularly proprietary about the gulch.

  During the trek across the golf course, along the fence of a cow pasture and into a patch of trees, Stella said nothing. When they reached the gulch she sat down cross-legged on a rock.

  Simon rolled up his pant legs, removed his shoes and socks, and sat beside her, dangling his feet in the water. Later, he would remember the icy cold and the way she had looked beside him. She had a pouty upper lip that showed a bit of her teeth. Probably, she had sucked her thumb as a little girl. He hoped she would never get braces and spoil the effect. He could not remember ever meeting anyone whose emotions lay so close to the surface, as if her skin were simply a transparent film behind which the drama of her life played out for all to see. She had taken such delight in her food at the table, he noticed, really tasting each forkful, unlike Simon, who ate because he had to. As for her father, she had looked at him at one point with something close to adoration and at the next with loathing.

  “I’m sorry about the crying,” she said. “I get sort of lost.”

  “Are you all right now?”

  “Long as I don’t think about him.”

  “Then don’t,” he said.

  “If only it were that easy.” She made a gulping noise as she tried to wrestle back a new round of tears. “He’s crazy sometimes, mangles his tennis racquet, yells at other drivers on the road ….” She gazed at Simon helplessly as her weeping resumed and began gathering momentum. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry ….”

  He reached over to remove Stella’s sandals and set her feet one by one into the water. It felt perfectly natural, that he should handle her like that.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” she said, the tears lessening a bit from the shock of the ice cold water. “It’s like I’m crying because I’m crying.”

  “It’s what you do, that’s all,” Simon said. “Maybe if you stop worrying about it so much, you’ll feel calmer.”

  This was a new thought. It sat in her brain like a smooth round stone. She felt herself grow quiet inside. The cold water washing over her toes helped as well.

  “My mother says my emotions are ‘untidy,’” she said finally.

  “She must have been upset as well.”

  “Oh, she’ll just go read on her bed with the door closed. That’s what she does when he’s impossible.”

  “If the door’s closed, how do you know she’s reading?”

  “Well, she’s not crying like I do, that’s for sure.”

  “But how do you know for sure?”

  “Because I’ve listened at the door.” She cupped some water and splashed it over her face, cooling her flushed skin. “I wish there was something I could do to keep it from happening ever again.”

  “Maybe there is,” he said. “It’s the past you can never change.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, the water babbling rhythmically as it spilled around their feet.

  “You mean about your brother,” Stella said.

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry,” Stella said. Her mother never would have mentioned it. She always knew when to keep her mouth shut.

  “That’s all right. I’m glad you know about it.”

&nb
sp; Stella decided to keep quiet and wait. She concentrated on the water.

  “He was my twin,” Simon said after a moment.

  “How terrible,” Stella said.

  “It was. It is. We used to dream about the same things on the same night.” His eyes widened in surprise at his own admission.

  Stella imagined the two of them comparing notes in the morning. “That seems like some crazy kind of sorcery,” she said.

  “It seemed normal to us, though.” He was quiet, remembering. “Anyway, you can’t change what’s happened. It’s like trying to change the sun or the stars. The past is there already. It’s just … there.”

  Stella wanted to hug him in the worst way. Instead, she covered his hand with hers for a moment and waited for him to continue. It was what her mother would have done, she was certain, neither press him nor jump in with her own thoughts. She decided that she liked herself more when she was sitting beside this boy. She glanced at his legs, bare below the knee. The shape of them under that haze of blond hair seemed elegant to her.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Simon said finally. “Not at all what I would have thought of New York.”

  Stella kicked her feet in the water, cheered and grateful that he would appreciate this special place.

  “Who are the Indians in Indian Wells?” he asked.

  “The Oneidas—part of the Iroquois nation. They were the only tribe that supported the colonists during the revolution. They fought side by side in really bloody battles up here, and all they got from the government was a piece of cloth. Plus being kicked off their land.”

  Simon smiled at her passion. This girl didn’t feel halfway about anything.

  “What about Parson’s Creek? Why Parson’s?”

  “I have no idea,” Stella said.

  Simon laughed.

  “My mother brought me to this place,” Stella said. “Starting when I was really little. We made things from the clay. Of course, her pots and dishes were always lopsided, like her cakes. She’s a horrible baker. Everything looks like somebody sat down on one half.”