Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “Hello, Anne,” said Nana, who’d come out of her office.

  “Hello,” Anne replied. “I was hoping Maddie could give us directions to that local pond or lake or whatever. I brought along this map Maddie gave me at the closing—it’s been a godsend really because I’m hopeless about directions. I was thinking maybe she could show me how to get there.”

  “Of course, Maddie would be happy to help,” Nana told her. “And we both wanted to thank you for sending the Naylors our way. Referrals of that kind are the backbone of our business.”

  “Who wouldn’t recommend Maddie?” Anne said. “She’s just the best.” It sounded like a perfectly cordial exchange. And yet, I sensed they didn’t much like each other. There’d been an awkward moment at the closing when Anne made it clear that she felt that Nana, who’d come along to give me moral support, was talking too much and wasting everybody’s time. Nana does tend to go on, but then frankly sometimes so does Anne, so perhaps that’s part of the problem.

  On the other hand, I can understand Nana’s misgivings: Anne opted to work with me instead of her. Who wouldn’t be a bit hurt about that? Especially because, on the face of it, Anne is much more Nana’s kind of person than mine. Or their backgrounds are similar, at any rate. But there’s clearly something about Nana that seems to put Anne off. Or is it something about me she simply likes more? Perhaps it’s because we’re both mothers, whose concerns a childless professional like Nana has very little sympathy for.

  “My six o’clock had to reschedule,” I told Nana. “And the pond’s really not something you can find easily on the map. How about if I take off a little early and drive Anne up there?”

  “Absolutely,” Nana said. “Good to see you again, Anne. When you and Richard get settled in, Dan and I want to have you over for dinner.”

  “Oh, that would be so nice,” Anne said, and then, turning to me, she asked: “Should we follow you, or what? And how about your kids? Would they like to come along, too? Max and Katie just fell in love with Rachel.”

  So I called Paul and told him I’d get the girls after all, and Anne followed me in her car, a silver Volvo SUV that I’d never seen before, as I picked up my daughters from Kathy’s and then took the back way to Indian Pond. It’s up a winding dirt road that is badly rutted in places and with a steep gradient on some of the final curves at the top of the mountain, but whenever I checked in my rearview, Anne was right behind me. My girls seemed excited by the unexpected turn of events, as we rarely get a swim in on weekdays, and we arrived in a festive mood at the little sandy beach that the town maintains. The place was deserted, except for an extended family of geese that raised a honking racket when Max chased them into the water. In the summertime, I keep a tote bag full of bathing suits and towels in the back of the car for just this sort of occasion, and my daughters and I changed in the little bungalow in the woods built expressly for this purpose, but often used at night for other, less innocent, activities.

  Myths and rumors abound about Indian Pond. Springfed, about five acres altogether, it’s surrounded by birches, maples, evergreens, and glacial outcroppings. There’s some historical evidence that the Mahicans, who had lived in the area for hundreds of years before the first white trappers and missionaries arrived, had a settlement here, or at least hunted and fished in the vicinity. But the story about the Indian maiden who drowned herself after being abandoned by her white lover is surely a fabrication, though good fodder for campfire stories. And yet, I’m not sure why, there does seem to be something a little haunted about the place. Perhaps, for me, it has to do with all the memories of summers past. This is where I learned to swim, where I broke my collarbone roughhousing with my boy cousins, where I smoked my first cigarette with Terry MacElderry and got sick in the marshy underbrush. This is where I stood shivering while a half mile away a tornado cut a path of pure destruction through the woods and into town. And, of course, this is where I used to come with Paul. Though I’ve hiked up here in the fall and cross-country skied in the winter, it’s really a summer place. Its essence is sun-dappled and transitory. This is where my parents and grandparents, all gone now, picnicked and swam and dove off the rocks. And it seems to me that sometimes I can almost hear their largely forgotten voices echoing across the water.

  “God, that was just wonderful!” Anne said, spreading out her towel beside me on the sand. I mostly go in the pond for short dips because I chill so easily, and I was even quicker than usual that day, overly conscious of my thighs. I’d been watching Anne, who was in great shape, do laps, and the children, led by Rachel, play Marco Polo in the shallows. They seemed a particularly good combination of ages and needs. Max clearly admired Rachel, obeying her every command with glee, which made Lia, often truculent, fall into line. And Beanie, usually standoffish with strangers, entered right into the game, perhaps flattered by Katie’s obvious attempts to win her approval.

  “Richard’s talking about putting in a pool,” Anne went on as she ran her fingers through her short damp hair. It was darker wet, accentuating the planes of her face. Her cheekbones were high and rounded and her eyes had an upward-slanting, almost exotic cast. “But I’m going to talk him out of it. This is what swimming’s all about, do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said, pulling the towel around my legs. I felt suddenly tongue-tied. Up until then, my relationship with Anne had been professional and clearly defined. Though we’d discussed many different things besides Maple Rise, the sale of the house had been the reason we talked on the phone every day, and often several times. I’d felt secure in that role, useful, almost on par with Anne in the sense that we were on opposite sides of an equation: broker and buyer. Now, where were we? Money, education, lifestyles—so many things separated us that I wouldn’t know where or how to begin to bridge the divide. And it wasn’t just our societal differences. Sitting beside her on the beach, I realized that I wasn’t able to match her level of energy, her volatile spirit. Her effervescence made me feel dull. It had been a long day for me, and I hadn’t slept well the night before with Lia in our bed. In truth, I was too tired to try to find new common ground with Anne. I felt that we’d reached the end of something.

  “By the way, I showed the Naylors that place up on the hill behind yours today,” I told her. “I don’t think they’re going to go for it—but, just in case they do, I hope you don’t mind them being so close.”

  “Why should I?” Anne asked.

  “Well, I don’t know. I just assume you want to come up here to escape. Forget about work. Don’t you do business with Rudy Naylor in the city?”

  “Not anymore. That’s what I’ve been waiting to tell you!” she said, turning to me on her towel. “I’ve got the best news. I’ve been dying to talk to you about this, actually, but I didn’t finally decide until last Friday. F and M lost a big account, Haverford Athletics, as a matter of fact. I think I mentioned to you that things seemed to me to be going downhill fast with them. In any case, the agency brass asked if anyone was interested in a sabbatical. Probably just for the summer, until they get some new business. And I decided to take them up on it. I mean, why not? Richard’s got more work than he can handle. In fact, he’s adding people as we speak. Plus, I could really use a break. Time with the kids. Pull the new house together. I don’t think anybody realizes how hard it is sometimes—”

  When her voice faltered, I looked over at her. Anne’s eyes were bright with tears. I felt a rush of sympathy and concern.

  “What is it?” I asked, touching her arm. She shook her head mutely, laying her hand on mine, then took a deep breath and exhaled.

  “How hard it is. With the kids. Wanting to be there for them, but having to drag myself off into the business world every day. Richard doesn’t really understand. But the truth is, Maddie: it’s been hard, hard, hard! I just feel so torn at times, so unhappy, do you know what I mean? Of course you do—I don’t need to tell you. Sometimes I think I would have been a lot happier just being a plain old-fashioned ho
usewife. So I guess I get to find out now if that’s true or not. Isn’t this just great?”

  “Yes,” I told her, though I wasn’t sure she really thought so herself. Underneath her seeming enthusiasm, I sensed that she was still trying to sell herself on the idea. And a part of me wondered if she’d really thought through what she was giving up: the freedom a life outside the home gives you, that enlarged sense of self. But then I was new to work and Anne had been at it for a long time and in a much more demanding and competitive arena. Still, I sensed that her decision to take time off was more complicated than she was letting on. I also saw that it served to level the playing field between us again. In a way, Anne was choosing my old existence over hers. She was opting out. Her world would be what mine had been for so many years: bounded by the needs of others. For the first time since I met her, I thought I finally had a sense of what her life would be like day to day.

  “There was something else I wanted to talk to you about,” Anne said, cradling her knees as she turned to me with a smile. “The man who has that crazy place at the bottom of our drive?”

  “Yes?” I said, when she didn’t go on, though her head remained tilted in a question. “What about him?”

  “Well, what’s his story again? I mean, is he an artist of some kind? He makes those things he has out on the lawn, right? I’ve slowed down a few times when we drove past, hoping he’d come over and at least say hello—but I can tell he’s ignoring me for some reason.”

  “The best thing to do is just leave him alone, Anne,” I told her. “He’s a very private person. A recluse now, really. But, if you don’t bother him, you won’t even know he’s there. He’s really—” I stopped myself, though I wanted to say more. I heard the tension in my voice and felt it in my body. I realized how much I wanted to keep Luke locked away in the past—where I kept him in my own mind—safely out of reach of all those I held dear. It made me anxious thinking of him in the present—and particularly unsettling to consider how close he was living to Anne and her kids.

  “But didn’t you tell us he came from some wealthy family?” Anne continued. “I know you said that they settled this whole area.”

  “A couple of hundred years ago, yes,” I replied. A cloud was cutting off the sunlight, and I felt cold suddenly, uncomfortable in my damp bathing suit. But the chill went deeper than that. A gust of wind rippled across the pond, and I felt a shiver of foreboding. “They’re all gone now. Except Luke. And, believe me, he’s nothing but a burned-out case. Not someone you’d want to get to know. I promise.”

  She turned away from me again and looked back out across the water. The children were still splashing and laughing, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her thoughts seemed to be on something else entirely.

  Part Two

  5

  I suppose every place on earth has its own version of royalty. For us, it was the Barnett family. They had the necessary money, property, background, and good looks to make them thoroughly enviable. And they were visited by enough unhappiness to have their special status burnished by our pity and curiosity and endless speculation. Though I never once got to see Mrs. Barnett in the flesh, I felt I knew enough about her from overhearing my parents’ conversations and piecing together what I could from my mother’s phone calls with friends and relatives to formulate my own mental picture of her.

  “Stark naked on the front lawn.”

  “No, I hear it’s drugs this time.”

  “Third miscarriage, I believe. But are you surprised? The abuse that woman puts her body through.”

  “No wonder they send that boy away to boarding school.”

  “Howell’s up to his old tricks. He stopped by the store with some blonde in the car.” This last was a contribution from my father, the store in question being Heinrich Hardware, which my father inherited from my mother’s father and where, for most of my early teenage years, I spent my summers and several afternoons a week stocking the shelves and helping to run the cash register. In the mid-1980s in our rural backwater, this was more my father’s attempt to keep me out of trouble than to provide me with actual gainful employment.

  “John,” my mother said, looking across the kitchen to where I sat at the table, supposedly doing my homework. But I’d seen the woman in Mr. Barnett’s Porsche myself that afternoon as I was rearranging our display of batteries and flashlights in the front of the store, so there was no point in trying to shelter me from the knowledge that Howell Barnett was, to coin a favorite phrase of my mother’s, a womanizer. Or that Mrs. Barnett was an addict and a drunk. For me, in those slow, slumbering years when I was still under my parents’ cautious sway, these vices were pure abstractions to me anyway, as glamorous and unreal as those of movie stars. Born when my parents were both in their midforties and had long since given up on having a child, I was the shy, pudgy miracle that they dedicated their lives to pampering and protecting. I knew, of course, that Mr. Barnett was bad, but that only served to make him more interesting to me. His expansive personality, the fug of smoke and whiskey that clung to him like cologne, and the way he so clearly got under my father’s skin turned him into an object of fascination.

  “I’m looking for a corkscrew, sweetheart,” Mr. Barnett told me, his right fist tapping on the countertop like a gavel, while his left hand jingled the change in the pants pockets of his beautifully tailored, dark blue pin-striped suit. Along with everything else, he was a partner in a well-connected Albany law firm, one that specialized in government contracts, in wheel greasing, in settling unpleasantnesses out of court. He projected the nonchalance of the entitled, the goodwill of the easily liked. Under it all was an unbridled and reckless masculinity, the kind that made some women blush just because he looked at them. No, because he looked at me—fourteen and overweight, full of gauzy fantasies and inarticulate longings.

  “Hey there, Howell,” my father said, hurrying down the cluttered aisle from the back storeroom. “What can we do you for?” Uncomfortable with just about everybody but his immediate family, my father tended to make up for it by being folksy and overly friendly with his customers. I knew that if he’d had his way, he’d speak only to my mother and me and even then in gruff monosyllables.

  “As I was telling this lovely young lady,” Howell said, his smile still on me, “I’m looking for a corkscrew.”

  “Well, this happens to be a hardware store, Howell.”

  “I’m aware of that actually. But I thought by chance you might carry them. I personally consider a corkscrew one of the more essential pieces of hardware in life.” I heard someone giggling at this, realized it was me, and turned to stare furiously out the window. There was the blonde, the visor on the passenger side of the car lowered, reapplying lipstick.

  “Sorry. You’ll have to look elsewhere. Northridge Wine and Liquor should stock them. Although I imagine you must have several”—my father’s gaze followed mine—“at home.”

  There was no love lost between Howell Barnett and my father, though I think it was pretty much one-sided. I doubt Mr. Barnett registered John Fedderson as being much of an entity separate from his hardware store, while my father fulminated against what he imagined were Mr. Barnett’s politics, his coziness with the lazy, liberal Cuomo administration, and his patently loose morals and spendthrift ways. He was the kicking object for a large number of my father’s frustrations, so when Howell Barnett died suddenly two weeks after that appearance in our store, suffering a massive coronary while driving home at night on the interstate, I believe my father felt as bereft and cheated as any of what turned out to be Mr. Barnett’s many creditors.

  Apparently he owed everybody money, with the exception, of course, of my father, who demanded cash on the counter. From what we heard he’d left his affairs in a shambles, dying intestate, leaving his family to deal with a number of shaky investment schemes that seemed just this side of legal. The whole house of cards collapsed with the 1987 stock market crash, sweeping Mrs. Barnett and the Barnetts’ only child, Luke, the
n sixteen, into bankruptcy. With the help of longtime old-money connections, they managed to hold on to the beautiful center-hall Colonial that had been in the Barnett family for over 250 years, and more than two hundred acres of rolling, cultivated farmland and hilly woods, but that was about it. Luke, who’d been at Phillips Exeter when his father died, came home for the funeral and then, about six months later, when it became clear that his mother wasn’t functioning and that his expenses could no longer be met, came back for good. He’d been a shadowy figure in my mind up until then, a slim, silent passenger in the backseat of one of his father’s luxury automobiles who seemed as disinterested in us as we were intrigued by him.

  His unfortunate circumstances automatically conferred upon him a kind of heroic status, though he seemed intent on trying to blend in at the local high school, which he entered halfway through his junior year, when I was just a freshman. He wore the equivalent of our school uniform: jeans, faded flannel shirt, work boots. But he eschewed the backward-facing Red Sox cap and let his fair hair grow unfashionably long for that period. I have a vivid memory of seeing him, warming up for a track meet that spring, whippet-thin, flipping his hair back off his face.

  The truth was that I thought about him almost obsessively when he first joined the high school. He was handsome, mysterious, tragic, and so far out of reach. His aloofness made me feel inferior. I never considered the fact that he might have been shy, confused, even ashamed. It’s taken me far too many years to be able to think of him objectively, apart from my own intense and complicated feelings. At that point, all I was sure about was that he would never be mine. So I told myself that I didn’t want him. I suppose if I had been able to more honestly assess the inner workings of my heart, I would have detected some of my father’s defensive posturings toward Luke’s father, Howell; that need to wrap oneself in a protective layer of dislike.