Listening to frogs.
With no apparent cover of clouds.
Picturing a life spent together, and with birds, while they stared into each other’s eyes.)
Time: 9 P.M.–2 A.M.
Observers, Habitat, Weather: See above.
Remarks: Please sing Robert Burns songs for me, again and again, forever.
Comments: Your eyes are the deepest brown I’ve ever seen. I could spend my life trying to capture the scarlet tanager, and you. And yes. I will.
thirteen
EVENTUALLY, THEY SAY, ALL your old loves come back, in one way or another. Certainly a lot of Scarlet’s seemed to do so. For instance, when she moved to New York at twenty-eight and published a book of poems, there on her answering machine one day was a message from her old friend Peter Gleason. And from that point on the two of them had a regular Sunday-night date, always spent watching television in Peter’s apartment, eating Chinese carry-out and crying into their cheap white wine over their wayward boyfriends.
Both Addie and Tom, Scarlet’s first great loves, eventually came back too. Or, more accurately, she found her way back to them, though this took a while.
And then there was Bobby.
Though she wouldn’t have called Bobby one of her great loves. Those first two summers in Cider Cove, she found him alternately goofy and annoying, then wild and reckless in a way she hadn’t realized she needed. Together they broke into abandoned buildings, and rode their bikes through back alleys and gated cemeteries and other people’s backyards. Bobby’s fearlessness in the ocean inspired her. She wanted to do everything he did. At first.
Then, during the summer of 1984, when Scarlet was sixteen and Bobby was fifteen—the summer when Richard seemed lost to everyone—Bobby grew strange to her. She was sure it was her fault. It was her idea, after all, to kiss him one night, as they sat in a booth in the boarded-up diner in the middle of town where they often went (instead of to the movies or the arcade, as they’d told their parents). And when he kissed her back with a strange forcefulness, and bumblingly reached for her breast, she didn’t pull away. They might have gone on to have sex that night, if either of them had known what to do.
After that Bobby was wildly unpredictable, sometimes bolting from the house in the morning, the old screen door slamming behind him, without so much as a word to Scarlet, other times watching her almost tenderly at the breakfast table, offering to get her more juice, asking what she wanted to do that day. And if she minded if he asked Richard to come along.
“Of course not,” she always said. And she didn’t mind. It was one of the things that drew her to Bobby, his way of caring for Richard. And she was Bobby’s one friend who understood, and who never minded, who his brother was.
They also shared the same eclectic tastes in music then—a fondness for a strange mix of Bob Dylan (even in his mystifying born-again Christian phase), Pink Floyd, the Clash. Sometimes, at night, they’d sit with Richard in his room, all of them eating a stash of junk food from the corner convenience store and listening to “Blood on the Tracks” or “The Wall,” over and over. Even at sixteen, when Scarlet might have been driving (had either Tom or Addie thought it worthwhile to teach her), she preferred careening over the hills in the Cider Cove cemetery on bicycles with Bobby and Richard, screaming the lyrics to “London Calling.”
A kind of arrested development, perhaps. Scarlet had been happy, she thought, at twelve, thirteen, even occasionally at fourteen. Why not keep doing the things she’d done then?
Cora finally took it upon herself to teach Scarlet to drive that summer. Maybe to keep her and the boys out of cemeteries in the middle of the night, or maybe because she saw Scarlet’s sadness on the mornings when she sat at the breakfast table alone with a book, watching Bobby gallop down the stairs and out the door without even looking at her.
Scarlet did pine for Bobby that summer, at least at first. It wasn’t that she found him particularly attractive; he was smaller than she was, scrawny really, and his curly, brown-black hair was always a wind- and salt-dried mess—though when he combed it, or on the rare occasions when he agreed to let Cora trim it, it only looked worse. After their one failed make-out session, he and Scarlet agreed not to try that again.
“I think it’s better for us just to be friends,” he said to her a few days later, and even then she could hear the clunky, romantic-comedy cliché in such a remark.
But all she said was “Sure, that’s fine.” Because that was all she wanted—all she longed for really—as well. She didn’t particularly want to kiss him again; she just didn’t want him to leave her behind. “We’re misfits,” she might have said to him if she’d had the courage. “We need each other.”
Eventually, on days when Bobby didn’t want her around, Scarlet set her sights on driving. Cora was a good teacher, and Richard, who sometimes joined them, was even better. Though he never drove himself (it made him far too nervous, he said, to think of attempting to maneuver a four-ton steel box in the midst of a sea of people maneuvering their own four-ton boxes), when he rode in the backseat of Cora’s car during Scarlet’s lessons, he was a remarkably calm and observant passenger.
“You should start braking about twenty yards sooner, about five seconds after you pass the yellow curve sign,” he told her after she careened wildly around a curve on the outskirts of Cider Cove, failing to slow down in time. “Then start to accelerate again right at that blue mailbox,” he added. When she followed his instructions the next time they were out for a practice drive, she took the curve perfectly.
Richard also gave her precise, mathematical instructions for merging onto a busy interstate, and for parallel parking. By the middle of that summer, when she was back in Burnham with Addie and Tom for several weeks, Scarlet had a Pennsylvania driver’s license. Years later, every time she slid a car into an impossibly small Manhattan parking space on the first try, she said a silent thank-you to Richard.
The following fall Scarlet persuaded Addie and Tom to let her drive their rusted old hulk to school each day, so that she could leave after her five periods of classes and drive to the job she’d gotten in the kitchen of a nursing home in Doylestown. By Christmastime she had both a driver’s license and a bank account that was growing steadily, and she was plotting her escape. Somehow, she’d decided, she’d get through her final year of high school; working—and making money—would help, as would reading more Allen Ginsberg and Anne Rice and John Fowles (her reading was as eclectic and undisciplined as her tastes in music).
And somehow she would survive another year with her embattled mother, who’d spent a good part of the fall of 1984 once again camped out on the land south of Burnham, where foundations had already been laid for several new Burnham Estates, and from which the pair of long-eared owls that Tom had spotted the previous year had long since disappeared. She would apply to college somewhere far away, she decided, buy a car, and finally, finally, leave Burnham and her crazy, outsider, outcast life behind. The only thing she’d miss, she thought, would be the beach at Cider Cove.
Then, early one morning between Christmas and New Year’s, the phone rang. It woke Scarlet, who tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but then she heard her father’s voice, strangely breaking in the middle of a sentence. He was crying, she realized. A relative in Ireland, she thought at first, and then, panicking, she became convinced that her grandmother, Addie’s mother, was dead. She’d been living on her own for several years by then, since Addie’s father’s death; she still lived in the old farmhouse in the northeast corner of the state, looked after by Addie’s brother, John, who lived in Scranton.
But when she heard Addie wailing in response to whatever it was Tom had told her, she knew that wasn’t it. Addie loved her mother, but in a distant way, Scarlet knew; she wouldn’t have responded with such primitive keening to news of her mother’s death. That, Scarlet thought, could only mean Cora.
And then Tom was in Scarlet’s room, while Addie sobbed in the kitchen.
“
Scarlet, my love, listen,” he said as he sat on the edge of the bed and reached for her hands. “Don’t be alarmed. But listen, there’s something I have to tell you. That was Karl on the phone. Richard shot himself yesterday.”
“What?” She was up then, suddenly, fumbling ridiculously for her slippers and robe. She raced for the kitchen, with Tom following her.
To see Addie like that terrified Scarlet. Certainly she had seen her mother sad, even quietly crying, on occasion; in recent years she’d made Addie cry a few times herself, with a spiteful remark or a deliberate snub. But this was different—unimaginable depths of grief contorting her mother’s face. Scarlet stood helplessly in the middle of the room, not knowing where to look or what to do, while Tom held Addie, whose body shook with sobs.
“Who found him?” Scarlet finally asked. When they both looked at her, she knew the answer. Both of them tried to reach for her then, to hold her. But she ran to her room, to cry in her bed, alone.
At the funeral, Bobby didn’t speak to Scarlet, or to anyone. Cora looked distant and gaunt, her hair suddenly far grayer than it had been only six months before, when she had sat next to Scarlet in the front seat of her car, calmly talking her through a sharp curve in the road, laughing gently when she ground the gears yet again. Karl greeted all the mourners and steered his shell-shocked wife and son through all the proceedings—the service in the old Congregationalist church, the graveside remarks at the cemetery where Bobby, Richard, and Scarlet had raced on their bikes only two years before.
Later, back at the house, Cora handed Tom a box full of the birds’-nest models he’d worked on with Richard. And Bobby handed Scarlet a stack of albums. “I can’t listen to these anymore,” he said, and Scarlet nodded silently, wishing she knew what to say.
Lou was there too, with Ted and their two young daughters. She and Addie stayed with Cora for a week after the funeral. When Addie got home she looked thinner and grayer too, though the gray was less visible in her shoulder-length blond hair, cut shorter now, Scarlet supposed, to make it easier to care for on her extended “camping” excursions.
Addie didn’t draw or paint—or camp—for a while after Richard’s death. She began her collecting of bird carcasses at that point, carrying the more intact ones to Richard Schantz for stuffing and preserving. Mostly she read—more treatises on the environment, more accounts of pesticide contamination and the like. And Tom did what he had always done: He worked.
Scarlet never mourned, openly, after that morning when Karl had called with the news. But every morning that winter, she woke up with the same image in her head: Richard’s dark, unshaven face and downcast eyes as she’d passed him each morning in the hallway the summer before. Then, in a kind of painful, punishing ritual, after seeing Richard’s face in her mind, she forced herself to imagine Bobby walking into his brother’s room, probably after an afternoon of surfing with his friends, and finding him there, slumped over in a chair, blood splattered on the wall behind him.
Every morning Scarlet did this. Addie, she knew, must have been conducting her own private ritual each day as well. (What might she have forced herself to see? Scarlet sometimes wondered. Richard, so sad and desperate, placing the gun in his mouth? Cora, arriving home to an oddly quiet house, finding Bobby sobbing on the stairs, then running to Richard’s room, pulling herself free from Bobby’s grasping arms at her ankles?) Because when Brian Kent showed up on her doorstep one morning in early April, saying he was planning to drop out of high school and hitchhike somewhere, anywhere—anywhere to get far away from his drug-addicted mother, his cold and distant father and stepmother who wanted nothing to do with him—Addie invited him in and gave him a cup of coffee and got on the phone with her fellow squatters from the previous years and said Bert Schafer’s contractors were getting ready to complete the building of the first Burnham Estates, and so hadn’t they better get busy?
“So you see, Brian,” she said, when she got off the phone, “you can’t run away. We have work to do, and you’re needed here.”
And so by May, when Addie was once again gathering gear and supplies and holding planning meetings—this time with Brian and Bob the disgruntled engineer and a few new recruits—in the kitchen of their house on Haupt Bridge Road, Scarlet had made up her mind. If they would have her, she would spend the entire summer in Cider Cove with Cora and Karl and Bobby.
She knew it saddened Tom to watch her, the day after school ended, packing the old car he’d helped her buy. He hugged her, saying nothing, and then opened the car door for her—and as he did, she saw the tears in his eyes. For the first half of the trip to Cider Cove, she drove too fast along the winding country roads, windows open and the car’s old radio turned up as loud as it would go, willing the rushing wind and screaming guitars to burn away that image of her father.
Addie’s good-bye, on the back steps, had been more stoic: a quick, tight hug, a kiss on each cheek. “Give Cora a kiss for me,” she’d said. The other thing Scarlet didn’t let herself do, on that bright June morning as she drove toward the Jersey shore, was to repeat the question she often asked herself through those sad, busy years of her late teens: Why did Tom appear to love her so much more than Addie did?
It wasn’t Bobby who kept her in Cider Cove at the end of that summer. She hadn’t seen much of him, really. Or of Karl. They all seemed to be working constantly. That, according to Bobby, was how his father was dealing with Richard’s death—by working outrageously long hours, struggling to keep up with the “young Turks” at his job, all of them so much more at ease with new technologies than he and the other engineers of his generation.
“He seems almost panicked,” Cora said, on one of the rare evenings when she, Bobby, and Scarlet were all home together for dinner. “I really think he’s afraid he could lose his job—and that’s a bitter pill for someone who’s been the breadwinner for twenty years.”
Bobby took a long drink of iced tea and stabbed at the food on his plate. “It’s not that, Mom,” he said, refusing to meet either Cora’s or Scarlet’s eyes. “It’s that he just doesn’t want to look at us. We remind him of Richard.”
Cora stared at her own plate then, tears rolling down her cheeks, and at that moment—and at several other moments that summer—Scarlet hated Bobby.
Bobby, who might have been speaking of himself when he described his father this way, who worked late every night at one of Cider Cove’s innumerable pizza joints, then slept most of the day, only emerging from his room to eat a quick meal in the late afternoon before joining his friends—suddenly, that summer, a new, “cool” group, very much the Cider Cove in crowd—to get high before work. He hardly went to the beach at all anymore.
Cora spent much of her time at her pottery wheel. She had taken one class, before Richard’s death, and now she worked for hours each day, teaching herself more. Though her pots were getting better, she hadn’t yet achieved the dark beauty of the mugs and pots she would eventually make—the black raku with a hint of fiery red below the rough glaze. That summer, in 1985, she was “only dabbling,” she said. Still, Scarlet loved to hear her talk about how it felt when the clay moved perfectly in her hands, when the rhythm of her foot on the wheel hit that perfect groove with the shaping that was happening at her fingertips.
Even Scarlet was out of the house most of the time, leaving early for her two jobs in Cape May, cleaning rooms in one of the beachfront hotels in the morning, scooping ice cream in a shop on the boardwalk in the afternoon. She’d get back to Cora and Karl’s around six, too tired to move, and Cora would rise from her wheel to serve her a home-cooked meal. Then, revived by her food and her company, most evenings Scarlet would join Cora for a walk along the beach. Cora was, really, Scarlet’s only friend that summer. She felt, to Scarlet, like the only friend she needed.
As they walked they’d both point out birds. Scarlet talked about Addie and Tom, and Cora listened, offering no judgments or defenses. The only topics they avoided, throughout that summer and after, were
Richard and Bobby.
In the fall Scarlet got a better job, waitressing at a pancake house in Cape May, and she dutifully attended classes at Cider Cove High. What a solace it was, coming home to that silent, often empty old house, after those dreadful weekends with Addie and Tom at Lou’s in Washington—Addie and Lou drinking and laughing as if they were having a giddy college reunion, Tom sitting in miserable silence, staring at his uneaten food, Ted choosing a different fight to pick, with Lou or Addie or both of them, every night. But back in Cider Cove, the only sound Scarlet would hear, when she turned her key, was the whir of Cora’s wheel. It might have been the silence of denial—Richard’s sad and angry ghost, hovering there above Karl the workaholic, Bobby the aimless pothead, Cora the isolated artist with a sixteen-year-old loner for a friend. But it sounded good to Scarlet.
“It’s hard to explain,” Cora said to her once, her eyes gleaming, “but it’s just a very visceral, bodily thing, when a pot finds its center on the wheel. You feel it in your body, and yet it’s as if you had nothing to do with it at all.”
Scarlet envied Cora then, longing to feel that way—that grounded, that exuberant—about something, anything, in her own life. Years later, at work on a poem in the middle of the night in her rented room in Amherst, she found the connection, both verbal and visceral, she was looking for in a poem she was trying to write, about Richard. She’d been listening to a CD of birdsongs Tom had lent her, and when she heard that eerie, completely unmelodic, almost drowning sound the American bittern makes, she knew she’d found it: a bird that sounded as strange and disconnected as poor, lonely Richard had been. What she felt, at that moment, was such a clear physical sensation: She’d found the poem’s center on the wheel, she thought. It was all she could do not to dial Cora’s number then and there. She’d certainly called her for wilder and sillier—and also more desperate—reasons than this, over the years. But, she reminded herself, it was three A.M. And she knew how dearly Cora valued her sleep. Also, this would mean bringing up Richard, which was something they simply never did.
In Hovering Flight Page 16