by Paula Fox
Some mornings, Elizabeth woke up before Gran. She had learned to start a fire in the stove. She heated water and let out Grace. She would stand in the doorway gazing at the rippling bay until the cat came back, meowing for her breakfast.
In the late afternoons, she watched the shadows of the columns lengthening on the floor until dusk had flowed into every corner of the room, and Gran began to light the lamps.
After breakfast, Gran sketched her, mostly referring to the Polaroid snaps she’d taken, but occasionally glancing at Elizabeth from her worktable, as though she were a tree. Elizabeth had lost her self-consciousness. She went about whatever she was doing, hardly aware of Gran’s hand moving over her sketch pad.
Gran often told stories about her own childhood, her elusive parents, the variety of jobs she’d had as a young woman who had to support herself, and about living in France for a year. She talked about discovering her desire to become an artist, and her early years with Elizabeth’s grandfather.
Now, when Elizabeth looked at Gran’s sketches of Will Benedict, she had the uncanny sensation that he was looking back at her, that—as she learned more and more about him—he was learning more about her. From under the brim of his rakish hat, he seemed to stare at her interestedly.
On some mornings, Gran was brisk, strong, and laughed often. There were other days when she was silent, grim, and moved with increasing difficulty as the hours advanced, until all at once, she would sink in a chair and stare down at her hands.
On one such morning, the few words she spoke seemed meant only for herself. “There are tribes that don’t let themselves be photographed,” she said. “They believe the camera can steal their souls. I’ve come to think your soul should be stolen, all of it used up by the time you leave the world.”
There were moments when Elizabeth wished Gran was only talking to herself. She would pounce on some casual thing Elizabeth said, for instance, when she described her math teacher as “really neat.”
“Do you mean tidy?” Gran asked irritably. “What on earth do you mean? Children say ‘really neat’ about everything—hamburgers, music, horror films.…”
On a morning when Elizabeth padded downstairs with the laces of her sneakers untied, Gran stared at them with a grimace. “For goodness’ sake, tie up your shoes,” she said. “You look like you’re unraveling.”
“Everybody in school wears them this way.”
“Everybody!” exclaimed Gran. “Don’t you want to be an individual? I saw a rock singer on television wearing a baseball cap backward. Next day when I went to the grocer’s, all the people I saw under twenty were wearing their caps backward. We’ve become a nation of sheep.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t watch TV,” Elizabeth said angrily.
Gran’s face softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. The world is so different now. But I do believe that when language shrinks, brains do, too.”
Elizabeth wondered, at those uncomfortable moments, what her father’s life as a child had been like. Had Gran spoken to him in that impatient way?
She spent a part of every day with Aaron. They met in the cemetery. For a while, he was agreeable to being read to, although he interrupted her with questions: Why is the old man so sad? What’s a marlin? Why do the other fishermen laugh at the old man? Until finally, she cried out in exasperation, “Aaron! You talk more than you listen.”
“I must know everything,” he answered. “Anyhow,” he said as he jumped up and began his dance around the gravestones, “I’m tired of that story.”
It was the end of reading The Old Man and the Sea aloud. But by then, Elizabeth had become interested and went on to finish the book by herself.
She recited the poem Gran had written down. Aaron seemed elated by it. “‘The Secret sits in the middle and knows,’” he repeated, shouting the words louder and louder until they seemed to fill the meadow and roll up to the foot of the ridge.
One afternoon, Elizabeth passed Deirdre sitting on the Herkimer dock.
“How come you’re not with my adorable little brother?” she called out.
Elizabeth halted. “He is adorable,” she said. “But you aren’t especially.”
Deirdre stood and looked at Elizabeth somberly. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. “The truth is, I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad he follows you around like a dog!”
She walked past Elizabeth and through the meadow without a backward look.
On a rainy day, Aaron came to the cottage carrying a stained canvas bag full of cookie crumbs and a set of dominoes. Whenever he matched a domino of his with one of Elizabeth’s, he exploded into laughter, jumped up from the floor near the fireplace where they were sitting, and ran around the room. “Honestly, Aaron, cool off, will you? This is no fun,” Elizabeth protested.
Gran quickly painted a mask for him with watercolors. It was half lamb, half wolf. Elizabeth made two holes in it and passed a string through them. He stood humbly before her, his shoulders bent, as she tied it around his head. But at once, he began to growl and bleat. He refused to take the mask off until Elizabeth had made tea and filled a basket with cookies. Gran had gone upstairs for her nap.
“I like your house better than mine,” Aaron said, his mouth full. “Can I see your room?”
She took him upstairs. He peered into her room as though it were an exhibit in a museum with a velvet cord in front of the door.
“That’s your little bed,” he said. “You can look out at the moon from those little windows. And there’s the book you read to me.”
“The book you wouldn’t let me read to you.”
He grinned, and they went back downstairs.
“Your gran is an old hippie,” he said suddenly.
Elizabeth, startled, laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. He must have heard someone say it.
“I don’t know,” he replied vaguely. He wandered to Gran’s workplace. “Look at the launch!” he exclaimed. “And Jake’s there on the deck! I can’t draw a circle. How does a person draw anything?”
When Aaron had gone home, and Gran came downstairs to start supper, Elizabeth told her what he had said. Gran smiled broadly.
“It was your father who was the hippie,” she said.
“Daddy!” exclaimed Elizabeth.
“Oh, yes. For a year or two, his hair was down past his shoulders. The farmhouse used to thump with rock music.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Elizabeth. She didn’t know a great deal about hippies except what she’d picked up from movies. Lots of men had long hair now, lanky ponytails snaking down the jackets of their business suits.
“He wasn’t a serious hippie,” Gran said. “At least, not for long. Then he started law school … you came along. His mind just turned to other things.”
“Daddy, with long hair,” Elizabeth said wonderingly. “Wait till I tell him I know!”
Gran smiled. “He’ll get after me,” she said.
“But why did Aaron say you were a hippie?”
“Helen must have said it, though she’d never admit that. She likes to think she’s a woman of the world. I know that, secretly, she suspects artists are dangerous.”
“Why?”
Gran sighed deeply. Her mood seemed to change. “Because they are, I suppose,” she said almost curtly.
She put two bowls of thick soup on the table, muttered, “Bread … bread …” to herself, and reached to a shelf for a loaf, her fingers fumbling with the slippery plastic wrapper. After a moment, she managed to extract several slices and drop them onto a dish. She sighed again and sat down at the table, glancing at Elizabeth, who was holding Grace. For a moment, she looked blank, then smiled ruefully. “Little things can get you down,” she said.
Grace growled. Elizabeth realized she had been gripping her tightly. She put her on the floor and went to the table. They ate their soup in silence.
Who was this old woman who sat across from her? She had been the visitor on hol
idays, her father’s mother, someone who was nearly always at ease, who often irritated her own mother. Someone who once, when Elizabeth’s parents were out, had given her a lunch consisting only of ice cream. Elizabeth’s thoughts spun like a top. She struggled to make that pale old person, thinking her own thoughts across the table from her, the familiar Gran about whom she need not think.
There was enough on her mind. Mainly Aaron. He had begun to seem fragile to her, someone to be protected. But against what?
Yesterday, when he had ended their time together—as he usually did—by announcing that he was hungry and had to go home at once, she had paused at the screen door of his house to peer after him.
He hadn’t raced to the kitchen as she had imagined he would, but had gone straight to his mother, who was standing in the gloom of the hallway, polishing some object with a rag. He had clasped her about the waist, desperately, it had seemed to Elizabeth. Mrs. Herkimer had bent to enfold him in her arms. They had stood that way for long moments.
“Aaron is like one of those butterflies the wind blows about,” she said suddenly.
Gran looked up. “Or like someone born without a skin,” she said.
“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, and felt a rush of affection for Gran that left her untroubled for a little while.
She taught Aaron to play blindman’s buff but discovered that when it was her turn to be blindfolded with the scarf she’d borrowed from Gran, she was afraid to let him out of her sight. She tore the scarf from her head.
After that, he had to be the blindman so she could keep watch on him. He didn’t seem to mind.
One afternoon, he ran away from her. She went to all the places where they played, her panic growing. After an hour, she ran to the cottage, wanting to tell Gran she had lost him before she had to tell the Herkimers.
He was there, talking with Gran on the path leading to the dock.
“Aaron!” she cried furiously. “How could you be so bad? You scared me to death!”
He grinned and shrugged. “You sound like Deirdre,” he said cheerfully. “I wanted to see if I could hand you the slip.”
“Give you the slip,” Gran corrected. She, too, appeared cheerful, untouched by Elizabeth’s upset.
“I’m not like Deirdre,” Elizabeth protested.
“Sometimes you are,” he said.
The westering sun made the sky glow. The worshiping birds were sitting in a line on the sand spit, their beaks gleaming.
“How beautiful it is,” murmured Gran.
Grace came around the house to them. Suddenly, she flattened herself on the ground. “Why is she doing that?” Aaron asked.
“She feels all that immensity above us,” Gran said.
“An eagle could fly down and snatch her away,” Aaron said, dropping to the ground beside the cat. Gran took Grace to the cottage. Elizabeth grabbed Aaron and lifted him up so that she was holding him close to her. She could feel his heart beating.
“No eagle will get you,” she said. It seemed as if her own heart would overflow with gratitude that he was safe.
“Let me go!” he cried out in a sharp, unhappy voice.
Aghast, she put him down. A stream of words burst from him.
“They’re always grabbing me, picking me up, shaking me. They’re always asking me where I’m going and where I’ve been and what I’m doing and what I’m thinking … and am I sleepy … and did I remember to put socks on … and did I wash my hands, and did I change my wet shoes, and when I come home from school, one of them is waiting so close to the road I think they’ll get run over by the bus … and Deirdre is always barking and yelling and telling me she’ll kill me if I go into her room. Her room! Yow! Her horrible room! And why don’t I look at this book and that book and every book, and do I feel hot or cold …” His voice trailed off. He was staring at Elizabeth as though seeing straight through her.
Gradually, he seemed to find her again. “Sometimes when someone hugs me,” he said softly, “I feel like an eagle has got me in its claws.”
“Talons,” Elizabeth muttered.
“Talons,” he repeated gravely.
8
“I try to cultivate Spartan virtues,” said Mrs. Herkimer, walking into the water until it reached her ankles.
“I don’t have a one,” Gran called from the shore.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure what Spartan virtues were, but she knew they were both boasting.
She no longer attempted to swim. The cold was too intense. But she had come to love the bay, its changing colors and long tides, the birds whose flight strung black lines across the sky, and cormorants that often landed on a giant boulder at one side of the cove to stretch out their wings for the sun to dry.
Herring gulls flocked behind the fishing boats that went out from Molytown every day. Gray and white shorebirds on their wire-thin legs dashed behind retreating waves in search of food like so many pairs of hard-working scissors. She had seen seals swimming close to shore, a gleam of dark eyes in brown dough faces, and in the long, quiet afternoons, heard the busy hammer of a woodpecker in the woods.
On an early evening toward the end of her third week on the island, she ambled over to the Herkimer dock and sat down, her legs dangling just above the water. It was high tide and the gangway to the Herkimer sailboat was level. The air was cool; in the west, the sky held a tinge of red. Back home, an hour without something to do or someone to talk to had seemed to Elizabeth a waste of time, a kind of failure. She had discovered that she liked to be alone and idle. So she felt faintly disappointed when she heard voices drifting across the meadow.
Shortly, Mr. Herkimer appeared, holding Aaron by the hand.
“He saw you and wanted to come out and say good-night,” he said.
Aaron was wearing bright red pajamas and a large pair of flopping sneakers that must have belonged to his father. He sat down beside her. Mr. Herkimer went over to the sailboat.
“There’s the first star,” Elizabeth said. “It’s millions of miles away.”
“Maybe it’s only one hundred feet away,” he said.
Elizabeth laughed. “Then we could touch it, nearly.”
“No,” Aaron said firmly. “Because we might be as small as sand fleas. We might be the fleas of fleas. We don’t know how big or small we are.”
From the sailboat, Elizabeth heard either a groan or a muffled laugh.
“You’d better make up your mind,” Elizabeth said. “We are either big, or we’re tiny.”
“I never can make up my mind,” Aaron said. He was quiet for a moment. Then, in a whisper, he asked, “When you go away, will I ever see you again?”
It was a shock to think of leaving the island. Before Aaron had come to sit beside her, she had felt in her right place, like the island itself. But she had been jarred out of place by his question, reminded of time, reminded that the coolness of the air was not merely the weather of evening but a portent of autumn.
“You can’t tell,” she said at last. “Maybe I’ll come back next summer.”
“If my uncle is better, they’ll want me to stay with him,” Aaron said quietly, without resentment.
“We’ll have to see,” she said.
He stood up in his abrupt way. “Good-night,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Mr. Herkimer was standing close by. “You go ahead to the house, Aaron,” he said. “I’ll watch you.”
“Don’t watch me!” protested Aaron as he ran off the dock, the too-large sneakers thumping on the boards.
Mr. Herkimer remained. Elizabeth stood up, feeling uneasy.
“We … I … want to thank you,” he said. “It’s been good for Aaron … spending these days with you.” He paused a moment. “Deirdre can’t help but be angry because of the time we give to Aaron. But we must … we must.”
Elizabeth was mute. What could she say? She didn’t want to be thanked. How she wished Mr. Herkimer would go away!
A second later, he did, calling out a faint, sad “good-nigh
t” over his shoulder.
She went back slowly to the cottage. She had grown used to being outside in the dark, used to the outhouse with its loop of rustling ivy leaves.
She liked the evening sponge baths, the wait while water heated on the stove, the lighting of the lamps. She had said to Gran that she had grown to love this way of living. But Gran said when you chose it, it was entirely different from having it forced on you. “Only well-off people can afford to be poor for a lark,” she had said, and laughed as though gratified by a joke she had made.
The best things of all were the long, slow talks with Gran as they nibbled on cookies when supper was over, the plates washed and wiped and put away. The smell of Gran’s paints seemed to intensify in the evening. A new seascape might be on the easel. Grace would be sleeping on the sweater, or else purring as she wound softly around their ankles like a piece of silk.
Gran’s stories of her life, of Elizabeth’s father when he was a boy, seemed to spring from an endless source.
“Don’t you run out sometimes?” Elizabeth asked.
Gran didn’t answer at once. “I like telling you about the past,” she said. “It’s as if it is happening again.”
Often, Elizabeth paused in front of the portraits of Will Benedict. “Maybe I overdid that one a little,” Gran had said once when she saw Elizabeth staring at the drawing of her grandfather in his hat. “He was a romantic-looking man. But that one, with the hat, I did from memory. He never looked that desperate. It was me that was desperate, trying to make him come back to life.”
It was entirely dark now. Elizabeth opened the cottage door. The big room was empty. She shivered as apprehension took hold of her, a sense that Gran was nowhere in the house.
On the table, she saw a chocolate bar and, underneath it, a note.
I’ll miss our evening together, it read. I got too tired.
Elizabeth glanced at the stairs. She went up them on tiptoe, pushed open Gran’s door, and looked in. The glow from the lamps in the room below showed her Gran’s shape beneath a blanket, her head on a pillow. Grace was lying next to her. Elizabeth could see a liquid glint as the cat’s eyes opened. She stood in the doorway a minute, then went back downstairs to extinguish the lamps.