Charlie had a theory about her parents’ marriage. She said that when they first met, her mother, by virtue of her class, her education, and her beauty, had all the power in the relationship. It took Carl four years to convince her to marry him, and most of their courtship was epistolary, since she was in New York, and he was using his G.I. Bill benefits for college in North Carolina. It was after the children were born, when Carl’s career had taken off—when he was offered the chair of his department as well as the lucrative television gigs—that the ground shifted, and Addie found herself at a disadvantage.
Charlie said that her father had had an affair with a young stylist on one of those shows, and that her parents had almost split up over it. Her mother had taken her and William to live with a cousin in Paris for a year. When they got back, William had gone to college and Charlie had gone to Choate, where she spent her last two years of high school while her parents figured out their marriage. In a certain mood, Charlie would rail against them for “exiling her” at Choate; in another, she would wax nostalgic about “Deerfield Day,” or something called the “Last Hurrah.” When Charlie talked about the crisis in her parents’ marriage—in a breezier way than she might have if I’d known her while it was happening—she’d described it as a “necessary correction.” Her father had had to prove himself to her mother all over again. Charlie said that this dynamic was what reanimated her parents’ relationship, since it restored the conditions under which they’d first fallen in love—but added that if the guy she eventually married ever did that to her, she’d leave him in a second.
Charlie had instructed me to put my bag in the second-floor guest bedroom, where her parents always stayed when they came up on summer weekends. We’d turned up the thermostat; you could hear the radiators clanking, but it was still cold, and the house had a musty, unused smell. There was a queen-sized bed with a patchwork quilt, and a large wooden armoire with a heart cut out of the door. In the hallway outside the bathroom, a ladder led to an attic room under the steeply gabled roof, where Charlie had joked about Neel putting his telescope. I used the bathroom, where the toilet sat on a raised wooden platform to conceal the plumbing, and the copper content of the water (bracing, from a well) was evident from brilliant aqua stains on the porcelain sink. I looked into the spotted mirror above the sink—my hair a little wild, my cheeks still pink—and thought of the emotional toast I would make about Charlie’s role in our courtship, if Neel and I someday got married.
14.
We were almost twenty minutes late to pick up Neel, and I had been worried during the short drive from Aunt Penny’s that he would have gotten on a train back to Boston. But when we arrived at the quaint Gloucester rail station, with its round sign for the T Commuter Rail, there he was. The temperature had dropped and we were using the heat and the defrost inside the car, but Neel wasn’t taking advantage of the station’s enclosed passenger waiting area. He was standing outside where the light was better, under an antique, bell-shaped streetlamp, reading a book. The red digital numbers on the station’s display board read 6:47, but he seemed unconcerned by our delay. As soon as I saw him, I had a different worry. What if it was too awkward, just the three of us?
Charlie pulled into a space across the street from the station.
“There he is,” I said.
“So cute he’s reading,” Charlie said. “Look how serious he is. Also, I like the peacoat.”
“He doesn’t normally wear glasses.”
“What’s wrong with glasses?”
“Nothing—should we honk or something?”
“What do you think he’s reading?”
“History of science, maybe?”
“That’s hot.”
“Shut up.”
“No, really—I buy his act, and I like it.” (This was a joke between us, with several variations. We might say, “I like her act, but I don’t buy it,” or, “I don’t like his act and I don’t buy it either.”) “Are you ready?”
“No.”
Charlie honked and Neel looked up; I rolled down the window, letting in some of the cold air, and waved. Neel put his book away in the backpack, picked up something at his feet—it was the telescope, in its black nylon case—and jogged across the street, his breath steaming in front of him.
“Sorry we’re late,” Charlie said when he got in. “We were making dinner.”
“Dinner sounds great,” Neel said. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“It was all her,” I said. “She’s a great cook.”
“I like cooking, too,” Neel said. “My mom taught me, after my sister disappointed her forever.”
Charlie made an illegal U-turn in front of a stone church with Gothic windows, its white spire rising in the dark. “Really? Disappointed her how?”
“Moving away,” Neel said. “Not going to graduate school. Becoming a midwife instead of a doctor. Not saying who she’s dating.”
Charlie looked in the rearview mirror. Other people’s families always interested her.
“Are you going to cook for us this weekend, then?” she asked.
“Probably not,” he said. “I can only do Indian, and it’s almost impossible unless you’re in an Indian kitchen. But I did bring us something to drink.” He handed me a bottle in a paper bag; it was bourbon, and I could see that Charlie, glancing over, approved.
“Ooh,” she said. “You know what we should do?”
* * *
—
The heater in the Jetta worked only intermittently, and we could see our breath inside the car. Charlie zigzagged easily through the village, with its narrow, irregular streets, and then took Bass Avenue east out of town, toward the Atlantic. The beach was surrounded by a preserve; on one side of the road were simple cottages—most looked shut up for the winter—and on the other were scraggly, maritime woods. The road ended at Good Harbor Beach, where the small parking lot was empty. Charlie found a flashlight in the glove compartment and we put on hats; when we got out it was cold but not unpleasant, somewhere in the high thirties. Charlie led the way to a narrow, sandy path that took us between the dunes to the beach. The beach was very dark; the houses with access seemed to be at least a mile in each direction down the coast. Small waves slapped against the sand, and the sky was overcast. In the breaks between the clouds, you could see a few stars.
“Maybe it’ll clear up for you guys later tonight,” Charlie said, trying to make me laugh. I elbowed her, but if Neel noticed, he didn’t give any sign of it.
“I haven’t been to the beach in years,” he said.
“We should stay off the dunes,” Charlie said. “My aunt is obsessed with shoreline preservation. But if we sit just in front of them, we’ll be out of the wind.”
We sat close together, me in the middle, and passed the paper bag back and forth. The dunes did provide a little shelter, or maybe it was just the whiskey making us warm. In the dark the salt smell was intense.
Charlie told Neel about Penny: how she’d never married, how it had been her dream to buy this place, and then how Charlie and William had spent summers here.
Neel said that the extent of his childhood beach-going was Lee Street, on the lake in Chicago, where his parents had taken him and his younger brother once each summer, always packing a cooler full of food. “For a long time I thought that the point of going to the beach was to eat.”
“We did that, too,” Charlie said. “But Helen had the real experience in L.A.”
“Not really,” I said. “It was a good forty-five minutes from where we lived, and my parents were always complaining about what it cost to park. We went in the summer. But none of us really liked it.”
“You lived in L.A. and you didn’t like the beach?”
“I like this beach,” I said. “The ones in L.A. are so exposed. And I used to be scared of going in the water.” The whiskey was making me more comfor
table.
“Sharks?” Charlie said.
“Waves. I’d read some book about a tsunami. Once I was being such a pain in the ass that my parents actually packed up the car and pulled out into the street—pretended like they were going to leave without me—just to make me get in.”
“Look,” Neel said, pointing to a gap in the clouds.
“Is that the comet?” Charlie asked.
“No—good eyes, though. I thought it was the International Space Station, but it’s just a weather satellite. The comet wouldn’t look as if it were moving like that.”
Suddenly a section of the water lit up, a green-and-white cone.
“What is that?”
“From the parking lot,” Charlie said. “It’s so lame—sitting in your car to look at the water.”
“It’s not even that cold,” Neel said.
“Have you guys heard of polar bear clubs?” Charlie turned to me. “My aunt’s in a women’s one. They run down here in the winter and get in—all these ladies in bathing caps. Then they go to someone’s house and eat pancakes.”
“I forgot my bathing cap,” Neel said.
“I think we should go for it,” Charlie said.
“The water’s probably warmer than the air,” Neel speculated. “But what about afterward?”
“It’s just to the car,” Charlie said. “I’d love to hear what those people in the parking lot say, when they see three naked butts in their headlights.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“I’m game,” Neel said.
Charlie laughed. “Come on. I polar bear dare you.”
If not for Charlie, we never would have done it. In retrospect I think we were lucky neither of us suffered hypothermia. I say neither of us, because I made a point of not looking as we undressed, and then as we started to run, the headlights switched off. Whether Charlie was right, and some old couple was horrified, or the car just left at that moment by coincidence was unclear, but because it was so dark, I believed it was the three of us running screaming to the water. The water was so cold that for a moment there was nothing but a burning sensation. I made it only to my waist before turning around, but Neel dunked his head, made a great bellowing sound, and was ahead of me as we ran back dripping toward the parking lot. I saw his body then, thin and light gray in the dark, and—I don’t think this is fabricated—made myself remember exactly how I felt, preserving it, in case I never was that happy again.
Charlie was already sitting in the driver’s seat, fully clothed. She had started the engine and managed to get the heat blowing. She was blasting Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple,” our new favorite.
I tried to talk, but I couldn’t make my mouth move.
“Traitor,” Neel said.
“Are you kidding?” Charlie said. “Who was going to get your clothes?” She passed each of us a bundle.
I struggled into my sweater and jeans, then turned around and looked at Neel. His hair was wet and there were actual, tiny ice crystals in it. He’d gotten his cords and T-shirt on, and was pulling a sweater over his head.
“Who stayed in longer?” he asked Charlie, pulling his sweater over his head.
“I did,” I answered for her. “You couldn’t take it.”
“You didn’t even dunk,” Neel said, reaching out to touch my hair.
15.
After dinner we sat in the living room and finished the whiskey. Charlie was on the couch, and Neel and I sat in the worn armchairs closest to the fire.
“This is a great place,” he said, looking admiringly around Aunt Penny’s living room. He wasn’t the type of young person who disparaged his elders’ taste; I thought he was likely to prefer the family of china ducks on the brick mantelpiece, the multicolored braided rag rug, to anything sleeker or more refined. I could see his appreciation for Charlie deepening, too, because this was a place she clearly loved.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “Whatever’s going on, it’s always a good place to escape.”
“We could use a place like that in my family,” Neel said.
Charlie looked at Neel curiously. “What’s the deal with your sister?” she asked. “Who’s she dating that your parents don’t like?”
“A doctor,” Neel said. “Super nice guy.”
“So?” Charlie said.
“He’s Jamaican,” Neel said.
“Indian Jamaican?” Charlie said. “Are there Indians in Jamaica?”
“There are Indians everywhere. But he’s a black guy.”
Neel didn’t talk a mile a minute to cover up the fact that he’d just referred to someone’s color, nor did he rush to clarify that he didn’t feel as his parents did.
“I once saw a movie where this Indian guy in New York had to go back to India to choose a bride,” Charlie said.
“I’ll get my ticket as a graduation present,” Neel deadpanned.
“Your parents don’t care who you marry?”
“It’s not that they don’t care.” Neel had stood up and was stoking the coals; now he replaced the iron poker and turned to face us. “They’d like her to be Indian. But they’re not hoping to arrange it or anything—they’re pretty assimilated.”
Charlie held up her hands. “Just wondering.”
“What about you?” Neel said. “What do your parents have in mind?”
“An extremely successful black guy,” Charlie said. “Failing that, an extremely successful white guy will be okay.”
Neel laughed. “I think our parents are on a similar trip, just with slightly different parameters.”
“Kids?” Charlie said. In a group she often liked to throw out a topic and then listen to everyone respond. She already understood back then how much people like to talk about themselves.
“No, thanks,” Neel said.
“Helen? Are you still in the ‘no’ column on munchkins?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said you weren’t sure.”
“I just feel like there are enough people already,” I said. “If I really wanted a kid, I guess I’d adopt one.”
“But then you don’t know what you get,” Neel suggested.
“You don’t know what you get either way. Plus you can be older and adopt. It takes forever to get established in science.”
“Helen knows exactly what she wants,” Charlie said. She pulled a red wool blanket off the back of the couch, and tucked it around her knees. She was wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater that made her wrists look especially delicate, emerging from the sleeves, her fingers especially long. No one disagreed about Charlie’s beauty; it was an incontrovertible fact.
“Penny didn’t have kids?” I asked.
“No,” Charlie said. “She was married, when she was young—but he was supposedly horrible. Now she’s with this really nice guy my mother calls ‘Penny’s gentleman friend.’ Gerald. But I think she’s sad about the no-kids thing.”
I had a sudden realization. “Aunt Penny’s the one who made that Winnie-the-Pooh sampler.”
Charlie nodded. “She did it when I was born. We’ve always been really close.”
“Winnie-the-Pooh?” Neel asked.
“She embroidered one of those nonsense rhymes,” Charlie said. “ ‘Cottleston Pie.’ My mom says it took her a year.”
“ ‘A fly can’t bird but a bird can fly,’ ” Neel said.
Charlie looked pleased. “He knows it!” She winked at me. “I like him, Helen.”
“Phew,” Neel said. “And it’s all thanks to my parents’ British-colonial taste in children’s literature.” He got up and went to the window, parting one of the curtains. “Hey, it looks a little clearer out now—if you guys want to give the comet a shot?”
“You know what,” Charlie said, jumping up. “I should call Penny—just t
o tell her everything’s okay with the house.”
I was suddenly frantically nervous. “I’m sure it’s still too cloudy.”
Charlie winked at me. “You kids go on up and see. I’ll be there in a sec.”
* * *
—
I climbed the ladder to the loft bedroom first; Neel followed me. There were two single beds fitted with yellow-flowered spreads. The bedspreads were some sort of synthetic fabric with thick piping, more like dust covers than blankets, as if the room weren’t often used. The blue-and-white patterned wallpaper was sun-faded on one side, and an aged craft project, two wooden sticks wrapped in yellow and orange yarn, a God’s Eye, was nailed above one of the narrow beds.
Neel moved the optical tube to the side to crack the window. “You know we’re not going to see anything.”
I thought I’d never liked someone’s face so much for no special reason. There was something about the big eyes, shaggy hair, and slightly crooked nose that had appealed to me immediately. His shoulders were broader than you would expect for someone as thin as he was.
“It doesn’t reach perihelion until December,” I told him.
“We’d still be able to see it—if it were clear.”
“Did you check the weather before you came?”
He raised his eyebrows at me. There was a faint stubble on his upper lip. “Did you check before you invited me?”
“It was Charlie’s idea. I think she wanted some company.”
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