by Heather Ross
Jane and I spoke again the summer before I turned twenty-eight. I was still angry, still bitter, but also becoming self-sufficient, finally. I had started my own business and was, at least from a distant perspective, a functioning, successful young adult. Jane and I and her husband, my uncle, were alone together at The Red House. She seemed tired to me, and while the house felt as though she was caring for it and loving it more than ever, her energy and optimism seemed to be waning. Her children were all away, their own lives no longer allowing for long summers in Vermont. Over morning coffee she looked up at me, and with a smile and that warbling, dramatic voice coming back for just that instant, and with a brief lift of her arm, she said, “I just hate your mother for the fact that she did absolutely everything wrong, and yet you turned out perfectly!” It was meant to be funny, and actually, it was. It was also meant as a blessing, a happy proclamation, and while we both knew it wasn’t totally true, it struck me that I had a better shot at making it true if someone already believed that it was. A few fleeting years later, Jane was diagnosed with cancer. Everyone seemed optimistic at first, but she died the following summer, just a few days before she had planned what I think she believed would be her last summer in Vermont.
Without Jane to defend it, discussions about The Red House seemed suddenly to be about what was wrong with it. It was falling apart, unsafe, too far away. In the span of two years, Jane was gone, and both of my grandparents, and then the house was put up for sale by my mother and uncles, who now owned it. It was something that most of my generation didn’t want to have happen, but for Martha and Rachel it was especially sad, because the house had been Jane’s place, and because we had scattered her ashes there. And then Martha was married, and then she was pregnant, and then one spring weekend we were all in her house—Rachel, Martha, my aunt Carol, and me—to attend her baby shower, which was being thrown by a group of Jane’s closest and oldest friends at a stately suburban home. I knew that Martha was appreciative but also dreading this. I didn’t think anybody at the party knew me other than my cousins and aunt, but I was wrong. A slight woman, about Jane’s age, came up to me and introduced herself. “You are Tupy, aren’t you? One of the twins?” I nodded. “Jane told me so much about you. We walked together, you see, for exercise, nearly every week. I have been hearing about you and your sister and your mother for so many years. It’s remarkable to meet you.” She was studying my face now, with wide eyes, as though she wasn’t sure she could trust me. I wondered for just an instant what Jane could have been telling her, how she had managed to include us in her glowing reports of The Red House. “She was always so concerned about you both, she would worry so much, and tell me about everything that was happening to both of you. She spent so much time worrying, but what could be done?” I was too stunned to respond. It was true, I saw now. What could have been done? Other than loving us, other than choosing to see what we had instead of what we didn’t have, other than forcing us to sing out loud and marching us up grassy hillsides to sit under the stars, other than, just once, putting her arms around us and telling us that she understood, what else could she have done?
When Jane was gone and her spell was finally broken, it became clear that her life was more ordinary, and far less perfect than what we had thought. She had never been one to talk about the negative, to waste time worrying over the unchangeable past, to dwell on the bitter or the unfair. Because of this we had thought that her life was perfect and bright, without sadness or pain, but of course that isn’t true of anyone’s life. And I realized that she had told me everything, she told me her secret that afternoon in The Red House, when she held me more tightly than my own mother ever had and said those two words over and over again: “I know, I know, I know.”
Most importantly, Jane’s happiness, and her love for her children, and her love for The Red House, and the gift that she gave my family in the form of that place through her eyes and those summers together had been very real and more profound than we could have understood when we were young. Jane’s childhood had probably not even included bonfires, but because of her, mine did.
I think of Jane every time a J. Crew catalog arrives in my mailbox, which seems like every other week. There are fewer bonfires on the cover now, but just as many fresh-faced, optimistic young people who seem to be living perfect lives draped in plaid and glee. I don’t resent them the way I did as a kid or look at them and wish that I had what they had. I know now that it’s possible to make a bonfire at the top of a dark mountain, or to choose to live your life as a series of beautiful moments, born out of your own imagination rather than through inheritance, or legacy, or status. I know that happy moments make a happy family, and that it’s not the other way around. I imagine that those catalog-cover faces are only happy in that moment, that when they get home from Aspen or Montauk or Stowe they will learn that their parents are divorcing, that they are moving far away, that their father has been in love with someone other than their mother for twenty years, that someone they love is sick and will not be getting better. But it doesn’t mean they can’t have a bonfire, or sing a camp song in a round, or live in some way, in a small moment, in the faint flickering light of a fire that hides more than it reveals, as though nothing in the world deserves worry.
HOW TO
catch a frog
I DON’T THINK I EVER ACTUALLY SAW THE face of the man who drove the gray Peugeot with the Quebec license plates down our dirt road on summer Monday mornings. The only time I saw his car in town, pulling up to the Village Store’s gas pump, I hid from him because in my mind we were sworn enemies, though now I’m not sure he even knew that I existed. I was seven, almost eight.
I also don’t know how we knew that the man in the gray Peugeot owned a French restaurant in Montreal, the kind that served frog legs. Someone told my mother and she told us, but we could tell that she thought that he was not worth knowing. The Peugeot only appeared in the summer and the early fall, and then the snow would fall heavily, as it always did in those days, and the wagon road that led up to the old farmhouse that he rented would never be plowed, and it was as though he had never been there at all.
The first time I saw the Peugeot stopped on our road, I thought it was stalled. I had woken up and noticed that our cat had not come home for two nights in a row, and was walking along the edge of the road, pushing my bike, looking into the tall weeds, hoping that I wouldn’t find her there. The Peugeot looked like the kind of car that broke down a lot. Up close you could see little spots of rust along its bottom edge. Its tires looked smooth and small. It was stopped right in the middle of the road, as though the man could not have imagined anyone else needing to go anywhere. He was lucky my mother was still in bed; she drove fast and surely would have called him an a-hole and might have even run into him. The man was standing over the car’s low, curvy hood, on which was balanced a tin bucket, the kind used for collecting sap from a maple tree. His shoes were shiny and flat and had square toes that stuck up in the front, so much so that I could see them doing so from the back, and his pants were tight and creased and an ugly brown. His body bulged out above his belt, and his arms looked skinny and long as he dug around in the tin bucket with quick, careful movements. His face was hidden from me.
Next to him stood Clive and Ronnie Rogers, still dressed in their barn clothes. They weren’t exactly brothers but a nephew and uncle who were only a few years apart, and inseparable. Their family was a prolific lot with a confusing structure that lived in a group of houses and trailers clustered around a small cow barn at the bottom of a wet gulch about a mile from our house. The gulch always smelled of the cows that grazed its sloped perimeter, leaving thin green paths through the trees and chewing away anything that resembled grass, exposing rocky outcroppings covered with a beautiful mossy carpet that would have been perfect for wandering along if it didn’t smell so sour. There were always lots of cars in their driveways, clustered together and looking related, all vaguely American, bland in color, all of them a
fflicted with varying amounts of the same rash-like rust.
Clive and Ronnie were just a few years older than my twin sister and me and had a sister—and/or cousin—who was just a year younger, but we never, ever considered her a potential playmate except for the one time we heard Clive bragging that they had caught a baby raccoon and were keeping it as a pet, but by the time we got there it had caused such destruction that it had been returned to the woods. I remember Clive’s sad, plain little sister standing in her doorway explaining to me why raccoons did not make good pets. “They sleep during the day, and at night they rob you and chew on you.” My sister and I were horrified by her callousness and spent the better part of that day walking through the marshy woods around the gulch looking for the baby raccoon. Nothing small could survive for very long without a mother here, even in the summer. We filled our pockets with cat food and made small piles of it on downed trees and on wide maple leaves, set like plates, wondering at the odds of her having been found by her mother. We decided that if we found her, we would take her home and let her chew on anything she liked. There wasn’t a single item or surface in our home that required protection from chewing or scratching or dirt, and we certainly didn’t have anything worth robbing. We lived without much separation between indoors and out, the presence of wildlife not being an exception, unless it was very cold, and then it was not us that the doors and windows were meant to keep in but the precious heat that we struggled to trap between our uninsulated walls.
The boys looked up at the man as though they were waiting for something. After a moment of what seemed like tense discourse, they all took a step back from the bucket, and the man reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, opened it, and gave each boy what looked like a dollar bill. Then he put the bucket into the trunk of his car and drove away, giving them a slight, dismissive wave as he went. Clive and Ronnie were walking toward me now, in quick, excited steps. Ronnie, who was younger and still occasionally forgot to try to look tough around girls, shook his dollar at me. “A whole dollar, look at that!” he said, and then spun around on his sneakered heel and waved the bill in my face.
“For what? Nightcrawlers?” I asked, knowing that even the very large ones weren’t worth more than five cents, and the man did not look like a fisherman.
Ronnie clearly wasn’t sure if he was supposed to tell me, and looked to Clive, who took a step toward me and turned his head slightly before saying in a terrible, older-boy voice, “No, stupid. Frogs.” I said nothing but pushed past them with my hands tightly wrapped around my handlebars and then climbed on my bike and, when I knew that they couldn’t see me anymore, I started pedaling hard in the direction of home. That bucket had been full of frogs, maybe twenty of them, all destined for the man’s plates. They had come from the beaver pond, surely. Those were my frogs, and they didn’t belong in a pot or a pan or whatever was used to cook a frog. They belonged in their pond. In my pond.
My mother was equally horrified, at least momentarily, when I told her what I had seen, but was more focused on the coffee sputtering away on the gas burner of our stove. She stood with one hand on her hip, wearing an ankle-length flannel nightgown and already smoking an unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarette. The doings of our neighbors were of endless interest to her, even though she lived far above them all in her mind. We were surrounded by people who were all close-knit, intermarried, and endlessly connected. We knew everything about them and they knew everything about us, but we were not a part of the community that was their whole world. We were outsiders, even though my sister and I had been born in Vermont and had lived there our whole, short lives, going to the same schools and stores. We were better than they were; this was made clear to us. My mother had grown up the daughter of an oil man, after all, and had gone to the very best schools in Europe and on the East Coast and was an artist and a bohemian and lived in an old, one-room schoolhouse on the top of a mountain with two tiny daughters by choice, because the beauty and solitude were inspiring and moving and because she wanted to grow her own food and flowers. We had options. Except that now we were here because we had no other place to go. We had been here so long and were so distracted by trying to keep the house from freezing solid that we had started to forget what those options were, and now the money was all gone and we were just as poor as the Rogerses and everyone else who lived on our road year-round. The happy, idealistic band of young people with whom my mother had come here ten years prior had mostly gone home to Connecticut and Virginia, and when they came back to visit us, their new husbands and wives and then children would step out of their shiny cars and stand at the edge of our yard wondering how they were supposed to get to the front door without ruining their shoes.
My sister was sitting at the long bar that divided our kitchen from the rest of our living space, eating toast and petting Plum, the cat that I had been out looking for all morning. I pulled Plum down into my arms and gave her an unwanted hug. She was plump and soft and fine and wriggled away from me and back to my sister and the poorly guarded butter dish. My sister shared my dedication to the protection of The Cute, especially The Baby Cute. We loved frogs, with their wide little eyeballs and glossy green noses poking out of the water at the edge of our beaver pond and their perfect, little webbed fingers. We loved the way they swam and copied them when we were underwater in the deep pool that was at the base of the waterfall behind our house. “Watch me,” we would say to each other, one of us on the rock that we used as a jumping-off point and the other already in the water. “And tell me if I’m doing it right.” And then we would take a deep breath and dive under and swim like a frog through the crystal-clear water until we reached the edge of the pool where the waterfall was and we would come up for air and look to see what sort of frog-swimming score we had earned. “I would have had my fingers apart,” I would shout over the roar of the waterfall, holding my hand up with my fingers spread, “except they aren’t webbed enough, so it’s better if they are closed.”
I had caught a million frogs, but I had let them go. If they were small and young, they almost always peed in your hand from being afraid. Frogs can see shadows with their eyes closed, because their skin is so thin, so you must be very careful not to get between them and the sun. The trick to catching them is to wait for them in the water, with the sun in your face. They will be sitting on the edge of the water, especially if it’s morning, warming themselves up. Then you have your sister or your dog startle them from behind so that they leap into the water and start swimming madly. Frogs are not good at making quick turns when they are swimming as fast as they can, so you need only to cup your hands and position them underwater properly, and they will swim right into them. It’s very important to let them go right away. They breathe through their skin, and if you get too much of your own skin’s oils and dirt on them, they can get very sick.
We knew that the man only came up on weekends and that Ronnie and Clive must have been waiting for him on the road, above the beaver pond. They had probably flagged him down on that Monday morning, and they probably knew what we knew, which was that he would be making the same trip every Monday morning until wintertime. A dollar was a lot of money. In 1975, it bought a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. It also bought one hundred Tootsie Rolls at the Village Store, ten Popsicles, or two gallons of gas. Ronnie and Clive didn’t own the beaver pond, but neither did we. They surely saw its frog population as theirs for the taking, and we saw it as ours to protect.
We knew that we could get to the pond before Ronnie and Clive because they had cows, which meant that they had morning chores. They would be up at dawn, but it would take them at least an hour to finish milking. We did not have anything resembling a chore and needed only to put on our shoes and run out the door. On Sunday night we went to bed in our clothes, which we did most of the time anyway. We found plastic buckets and put them by our bed, next to our shoes, their laces untied and waiting. When the first bit of light came into our room, we bolted out of bed and put them on. I ma
de a double knot in case I had to step into the pond, which had such a thick, muddy bottom that it would suck off a shoe if it wasn’t secured tightly. We ran out the front door, past the motionless pile of dark red hair, wool blankets, and cats that was our mother, still sleeping.
We had only to run across our road and through a large, sloping horse pasture to get to the beaver pond. Clive and Ronnie would come through the woods, where there was an overgrown road that began in their gulch. It was the same road that intersected our own, and it was at that intersection that I had seen them the week before selling the frogs. The sun was still coming over the hills and nothing was warm yet; the frogs were all still sleeping in their mud. We lay down on our stomachs in the grass ten feet from the water, with our chins resting on our folded hands, waiting for them to come out of hiding. Soon we could feel the sun hitting our backs and our bare forearms. It became hot quickly, and I could feel the water in my shoes becoming mist. I could hear small noises coming from the water, tiny splashes and plunks, and I knew that they were waking up now and climbing into the tall grass along the edge of the pond to sit in the sun. When I pulled myself up onto my knees to steal a look, two or three frogs leapt back into the water, so I quickly lay down again.