“I like Grand Union.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s just a store.”
“It’s a little different,” said Frances.
She took another cookie and I put the box away. “Are you coming to the lake?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I just want to straighten up. You go ahead.”
“I’ll wait for you,” said Frances.
“It’s hot,” I said. “Go down there and swim. You’re swimming so well.”
“Were you telling secrets?” she said.
“Secrets?” I said. “Of course not. We don’t have secrets. Stay and walk down with us if you want to.”
But Frances put on her sneakers and went down to the lake. I wiped off the table and put the dishes in the sink while Pearl put on her bathing suit, and then she talked to me while I put on my suit and my terrycloth jacket. Pearl always strode down to the beach in her suit with nothing over it.
“Let’s take the plums,” she said. She washed them and dried them and put them back into the brown bag. I took my knitting and we walked down to the lake. A few people were there. Nathan had been swimming—his hair was wet. He was leaning back in an Adirondack chair looking tired, his glasses beside him on the arm. Simon was dressed in his city clothes. He had brought a bathing suit but he wouldn’t change, much less go into the water. Yet he went to the beach every day and looked out at the lake. He stared and stared. “Is a mermaid going to come along and tell you something?” I said to him, but he didn’t answer.
Frances was swimming back and forth. She was allowed to go where the water was just over her head, and that was where she was. Her swimming had improved, but she always seemed to hoist herself out of the water when she stroked with her left arm, as if she needed to check, every few seconds, to see where everyone was. She saw us and came out and ate a plum, and then she wandered off into the little stand of trees for a while.
I knitted and watched her. I could just see her, sitting under a tree near the water. When she was little, she had talked to herself in a low voice, on and on. Once I’d caught something she said and answered her, but she was angry. As I watched her from the beach, I realized that even though she was bigger now, I was still listening for the sound of her voice, as she sat there on those pine needles—partly to make sure where she was, the way I did when she was little, and partly to hear what she’d say. After a time she came back to us and went into the water again, and then she sat on a different rock, just a little way into the lake. I listened to the men talk. Pearl had a conversation with a couple of women from other cabins, and then the others went back to their cottages. Nobody but our family seemed to stay at the lake for long. I liked looking out and seeing the light change as the sun went down. I liked watching Nathan, his chest hollow and skinny, lying back in the chair, defenseless and yet, it seemed, content. I even liked watching Mike, who was restless—smoking, stubbing out his cigarette and going to take a boat out, then smoking another cigarette, shouting at Simon to become different. Pearl didn’t swim, but wanted to be near the water. I took my own short swim and wrapped myself up again until I was warm. I sat in the sun and after a while it made me sleepy.
“I think I might be ready to start back,” I said, not in a very loud voice.
Pearl heard me. “A nap might be nice,” she said. We stood up. I reached for my beach jacket again. “Take the plums,” said Pearl, as I turned to catch up with her. She was waiting for me, squinting into the sun, her hand shading her eyes, her long arm graceful. I reached back for the brown paper bag. The belt of my jacket dragged in the sand, and I pulled it up and brushed it off and tied the jacket closed.
“Give me a plum,” said Pearl.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Maria Guarnaschelli’s faith called this book into being; Claire Wachtel’s determination and brilliance rescued it and its author many times. I’d like to thank those two past and present Morrow editors and the many others at Morrow and HarperCollins, especially Jen Pooley, who’ve been kind to me and my work. Thanks also, for helping me finish this book and supporting it after it was written to my agent, Zoe Pagnamenta, to the corporation of Yaddo, to Susan Holohan, and in particular to my mother, Rose Eisenberg.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALICE MATTISON is the author of two other novels and three collections of short stories, as well as a book of poems. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere, and has been reprinted in The Pushcart Prize. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Bennington College.
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PRAISE
PRAISE FOR
The Book Borrower
“In deceptively quiet, guileless prose, she has described the mind-numbing routine of child-care and the fraught, complex relations of men and women. Only Margaret Atwood (in Cat’s Eye) has written as knowingly about the friendship between women. Emotionally wrenching, beautifully realized work.”
—New York Times
“This excellent novel weaves the story of a 1921 trolley strike.... Mattison is concerned with the small decisions and coincidences that alter the course of our lives. Are they accidents, or impulses born of something deeper? Mattison’s observations are so minutely compelling that each feels like a shiny object, once lost but found unexpectedly.”
—The New Yorker
“Extraordinary.”
—Washington Post Book World
PRAISE FOR
Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
“Alice Mattison is a charmer. She’s one of those uncommon writers who are genuinely tickled by the ids and egos they commit to paper, and her characters bask—rather than squint—in the sunshine of her affectionate scrutiny. Men Giving Money, Women Yelling (is there an award for book title of the season?)is Mattison’s third collection of short fiction, and it’s crammed with characters—teachers, lawyers, social workers—who pop cleanly, if a bit frantically, off the page.”
—New York Times Book Review
“If Mattison’s spry language and light touch belie her careful framing of events, they also blithely pave the way for her finely hewn endings, which in almost every story captures the unspoken charm and mystery of a character or a moment.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Mattison treats each of her loony, alternately bored and besotted characters with tenderness.”
—The New Yorker
OTHER WORKS
ALSO BY ALICE MATTISON
The Book Borrower
Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
The Flight of Andy Burns
Field of Stars
Great Wits
Animals
CREDITS
Cover design by Megan Wilson
Cover photograph by © Sickles Photo Reporting/FPG
COPYRIGHT
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1995 by William Morrow.
HILDA AND PEARL. Copyright © 1995 by Alice Mattison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Perennial edition published 2001.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Mattison, Alice.
Hilda and Pearl : a novel / by Alice Mattison.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-688-13127-1
I. Title.
PS3563.A8598H5 1994
‘8I3’.54—dc20 94-2634 CIP
ISBN 0-06-093693-2 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780062232021
01 02 03 04 05 PSI/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
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