by Lauren Groff
I turned off the television and looked toward the lake, saw the yellow pod heading out like a bullet into it on an overlarge pontoonlike contraption. I watched until it faded, and then I turned away so I didn’t have to imagine it tunneling into the dark waters of the deepest parts of our lake.
AT PRECISELY SEVEN, the front doorbell rang. I was afraid for the moment that it was Ezekiel Felcher—I hadn’t gone out the day before, but I had seen his truck parked in front of our house for quite a few hours—and almost decided not to answer it, for fear of losing my temper and smacking him a good one across the face. But then I began to think of calamities that could have befallen my mother; a semi running over her as she walked home from the hospital, one meth-crazed loony shooting up the hospital, a peaceful aneurysm that came over her as she did the shift-ending paperwork, and I ran to the door, fast, tears already in my eyes.
When it opened, it was all I could do not to let those welled-up drops fall, as all six of the Running Buds were standing there, grinning at me, saying their gentle “heyyy.”
“Willie Upton!” said Frank Phinney. “We heard you were in town. What are you doing, girl, not coming out to run with us? We are mortally offended, kid. I’m not sure we’ll be able to forgive you.”
“Don’t listen to him. Nice hair,” added Johann Neumann. “You look good, Vilhelmina.”
Tiny Thom Peters, my pediatrician, held out a white paper bag glistening with arcs of grease. “We brought doughnuts,” he said, smiling up at me. “I promise not to tell Vi.”
“Buds,” I said, looking at these sweaty old men in their running gear, their legs almost indecently hairy in the soft morning. “It is wonderful to see you.”
IT MUST HAVE been an hour that we sat at the table, but I began to feel a peace that I hadn’t felt since I came home on the day the monster died. The Buds were their charming selves, spilling gossip and speculation. I learned that a baseball player who had just been inducted into the museum had had a little affair with a sixteen-year-old Templeton girl, and everyone was hopping mad. I learned that Laura Irving, Big Tom’s daughter, had run away three weeks earlier, and nobody knew where she was. That’s why he looked so fleshy, heavy. I learned that since I came home, I have been looking “pissed, pissed, pissed. Everyone told us so, so we came to see for ourselves.”
This is what Doug Jones, my handsome high-school English teacher, said. He winked at me, then said, “But you don’t look so angry to me. Just sad, I think.”
For a moment, they just sat there watching and waiting for me to say something. To confess, I suppose, to what made me return home. I thought of telling them about Primus Dwyer and my arctic adventures, about the little nut of a Lump inside of me. But Tom Irving had sold me my car for fifty dollars; Doug Jones had cast me as Juliet and Desdemona; Sol Falconer had given me a college loan, and, as he was rich and childless, it was a loan that I was in no danger of ever having to pay back.
So I looked at them and remembered then the first time the Buds and I became aware of one another. It was June and I was four, and I had somehow learned that the Presbyterian Church was having an ice cream social on its broad lawn. I had only ever once had a bite of ice cream; one of my mother’s male “friends” had slipped me some on a long silver spoon in Cartwright Café when my mother’s back was turned, and I loved it. From what I knew of heaven, there it was, on my tongue: sweet and soft and cool and filled with surprising truffles of nut and fruit.
So the afternoon of the ice cream social I walked away from Averell Cottage, which was easy to do because my mother was painting the dining room walls, and the house was far too big to be able always to hear what a quiet four-year-old was doing in it. I went up the block and trudged past the Bold Dragoon and up the long hill toward the church. Though Frank Phinney was Jewish on his mother’s side, Johann Neumann Lutheran, and Thom Peters Catholic, all of the Buds were there with their families, since the ice cream social was a Templeton institution, and no self-respecting gossip could possibly not attend.
By four years old, I had also somehow learned that if I spoke in a small, sad voice, and said that I had no father, I had a great mystical power over adults, and, mainly, over men. And so, when I leaned on tall Sol Falconer’s knee, gazing hungrily at his rocky road cone, and he asked me what was wrong, and I whispered that I had no money and, softer, that I had no father to buy an ice cream for me, he leapt up and came back with a cup of vanilla.
“Here, sweetheart,” he said, squeezing my little hand, and I stole off behind the bushes to eat the marvelous new food.
Tom Irving was my next target, because he was dozing in a lawn chair, and nobody else was around him. He smiled at me and bought me some mint chocolate chip, giving me a great fat kiss on the forehead. I was feeling wild and jittery by the time I approached Doug Jones, who was feeding his baby from a bottle. He looked at me a little skeptically—I had multicolored rings around my mouth by then—but handed me the remains of his bubblegum ice cream.
“Alas,” said the English teacher. “I find I cannot eat with sad little waifs sighing nearby.”
I think I stole, outright, Frank Phinney’s death-by-chocolate, and he let me, laughing, and I was screeching around the church lawn like an airplane with the other children when Vi came charging up the hill. In the movie of my memory, she comes up the hill as grim and huge as a terrible troll, accompanied by organ music in a minor chord. But she was not quite twenty-two then, still had her baby fat, though her hair was always stringy and her face never quite lovely. She was much smaller than she became later, but to me, at four years old and guilty of unimaginable badness, she was immense. And when she collared me and saw the ice cream melted all over my body, her eyes bulged and she said, “Oh no, Sunshine. No, no, you’re allergic to sugar!” and the men’s faces paled and dropped. They, too, were frightened of her, I saw. And when, perhaps from suggestibility or too much of the rich food, I started retching everywhere, they rushed over in a six-man herd and apologized until my mother put the puking little me over her arm and walked back home.
From then on, the Buds looked out for me. And now, when they were asking me what was wrong, I just couldn’t tell them the extent to which I had failed.
“Oh,” I said, trying to smile. “The usual. Heartbreak. Blah blah blah.”
They nodded, letting it go.
The door opened, and my mother walked in, then, in her nursing scrubs, seeming heavy, sad. She glanced up and gave a little startled yip, and then looked wildly from face to face. “What?” she said. “What is it?”
“Oh,” I said, playing with her a little, “just my prayer group.” The Buds chuckled uncertainly, then stood as one.
“We were just going,” said Tom Irving. “Nice to see you, Vi.” And then, with a great number of shouts about how I must come running with them, and they were glad to see me, and that we’ll catch up more next time, the Buds filed out the door. I saw, at last, the source of their discomfort; Reverend Milky was standing there in the mudroom, and the Buds ducked their eyes and said “Morning, Reverend Melkovitch” as each one passed by.
“Well,” said Vi, sitting in her chair at the farmhouse table, and rubbing the arch of her foot, “that was unexpected. Come in, John. I’ll start breakfast soon.”
Reverend Milky appeared sheepishly in the kitchen, and gave me a little nod. He was wearing what was almost a parody of hiking clothing, with a great fleece vest and too-short shorts showing his powdery thighs, replete with bluish veins. His red, hoary toes corkscrewed out of the kind of sandals that looked as if they were made from tires and old fan belts. And it was all, of course, topped with the great iron cross, his own personal millstone. “Willie,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “All right, then. See you later.”
“Wait,” called my mother as I walked away. “I invited John over so that we could all have a nice breakfast together before I went to sleep for the day. What do you say, Willie? Feel like huevos rancheros?”
Vi shoved a strand of greasy hair behind her ear, and tried to look eager, alert.
But I looked at Reverend Milky and said, “No, thanks, Vi. I think I’ll skip. Not so hungry right now.” But all the way upstairs, my mother’s face as it had just looked, flat, disappointed, hovered before me, and I walked two or three circuits around the room before I came back downstairs again. “But I’ll take some coffee,” I said and sat at the table, opposite the Holy Milk. As she passed on her way to the kitchen, my mother gave me such a smile of relief that I was glad for a moment to look at the good reverend’s pasty little face before me.
“So,” I said as my mother rustled around the kitchen.
“So,” he agreed.
“Going for a hike?” I said.
“Indeed,” he said. “I hear you are quite the hiker, as well.”
“I was,” I said. “Then I moved to San Francisco. The mountains aren’t that far, but you get so into your life in the city, all that excitement, all that movement, you find yourself lucky to go out into the hills once in a while and trot around. To be honest, I have so little time, I hardly ever go anymore.”
He looked disappointed in me, and said, “But God’s good earth is what he gave us to forget our worldly cares.”
I just said, “Huh,” for the sake of my tired mother moving in the kitchen beyond the doorframe, without pointing out that the earth is the world, and he was spouting nonsense. And that’s all we could find to say to each other—the Bible-beater, the prodigal harlot daughter—until Vi returned with the platter in her hands, talking lightly about Glimmey. And after she prayed, as we ate our way through the spicy eggs—I found I was hungry after all—she talked of miracles and monsters, of paradoxical mashes of fish and mammal. I looked at her and saw the biggest paradox of my life, my great, proud mother holding the hand of a person she only would have scorned a year ago.
I will never, I vowed to the Lump, watching my mother, be so lonely I date in desperation. My mother might have seen the ghost of pity move on my face, because she narrowed her eyes and gazed at me sternly for a moment. “How are Cinnamon and Charlotte?” she said. “Making progress?” This meant, I knew: if you’re not going to be pleasant, you can scram, you brat, so, with relief, I stood.
“Thanks for the food, Vivienne. So nice to see you again, Reverend. Hope you have a good hike. Don’t get eaten by a bear,” I said. Halfway through the dining room, I heard his worried voice saying, “Nobody ever told me there are bears here,” and when I sat back down to my letters I was still chortling to myself. The ghost had reappeared as a small purple knot pulsing in the corner of the mirror. I said, “And we’re off again,” and turned over the next letter in the bunch, this one in Charlotte’s hand.
18
Cinnamon and Charlotte, Part Two
From the Desk of Charlotte Temple, Franklin House,
Blackbird Bay, Templeton
The Seventh of January, 1862
My darling Cinnamon,
You must forgive my silence, for I was visiting with my eldest sister in her country-house in Rye, and was working there on a new book (as only you know). I have just returned, and even now, my maid is still unpacking my things. I am glad you are feeling better, and the tincture is calming you the way it should. You alarmed me with the talk of your husbands, but I do believe you were in a half-dream at that moment, and should not be taken seriously.
Well, you have asked me to report to you anything I may have heard about your sister: I do believe I heard something. I had stopped in at the Reverend Belvedere on my way into town, to deliver a letter from my sister. Over tea, the old gossip told me two things. The first is that Schneider, at the bakery, in the early morning of the day of the blizzard, reported seeing a vision when he stepped outside to cool his head. It was, he said, a parade of strange ghosts, decked all in white, ranged in order from massive to tiny and wading up Second Street in the hip-deep snow.
The other bit I heard was that the Vanderhees bachelor brothers—those two old Yorkers—had suddenly sold the Leatherstocking Hotel. You do remember the Leatherstocking, I am sure: the brothers had bought old Widow Croghan’s hotel in the beginning of the century and just recently updated it. Every room has a mural depicting a scene from one of my father’s Leatherstocking books: Natty Bumppo leaping down a waterfall, Chingachgook scalping a Huron, Natty weeping at the slaughter of Passenger Pigeons, et cetera. It was all very beautiful. The two men came to see me, to bid adieu, though even after so many years here, they can barely speak English. When I asked them who had bought their hotel, they looked at one another. “Large man,” they said. “Smell like woman.” This does fit the description of your sister, I believe.
A secret before I must speak with my waiting housekeeper: Monsieur Le Quoi has been very attentive since I took your good advice, and gave him a little bonbon I made with my own hands. We have walked together eleven times, and my French has gotten so much better. He has taken to kissing my hand when we part, and it burns my skin, Cinnamon, burns through my glove, burns when I am away from him and burns anew when I see him again.
Oh, Cinnamon, my heart is full of gratitude to you, my dearest friend, and your forced absence weighs heavily on me.
With great affection,
Charlotte Temple
January 9th, 1862
[rough draft, unfinished]
Dearest Charlotte,
I feel as if I’m breaking. There is something wrong with me. I do not know what it is, only that you can help me, somehow. I need to tell you something terrible, you see. The world is dark and mean. I don’t know what I…
January 14th, 1862
[rough draft, unfinished]
Dear Charlotte,
Why don’t you write? Why don’t you write? Are you too in love to write? Aren’t you my friend, don’t you know how sad I am, how lonely? Don’t you know anything? You think you are in love—you are not—you are in love with your father, Charlotte, and what you see in Monsieur Le Quoi is only your…
Averell Cottage
January 17, 1862
Charlotte—
It is very late—I cannot sleep, have not been able to sleep for so long now, for a month, since Ginger returned—not without the tinctures, I can’t sleep. I feel I am going mad. Charlotte, my husbands are in the shadows—I am so tired—they are around my bed when I try to sleep. I see them all there, looking down at me—they are in every reflection, in the dark spaces, husbands in the black window panes, husbands in the reflection of the moon on the lake, husbands swimming under the dark ice with the Glimmerglass Monster. Remember when we saw him, Charlotte—that day when we were walking along the shore, having just begun to know one another, and only twenty feet away, he emerged and looked at us, smiled his black teeth, then went down again—we were just girls, Charlotte, just twittering, and we had thought he was a myth, and there was something that day that cleaved me to you and you to me, despite all we pretend not to know about one another. My husbands are like that monster, hovering, and I have lit ten tapers here, the fire blazes, it is all as bright as noon, but in every reflection, every dark space, husbands. I know they are not here. But they are. They hide in the mercury of my mirror, they are not real, but they are, there is no such thing as a ghost, but they are here. And I am afraid—so afraid I cannot sleep—even Marie-Claude asks me if I am not well.
I am deranged, I think. The nervousness I had since poor Godfrey died has never gone away—I have just hidden it well—I write to you because I can no longer read—the text wriggles like worms. I feel feverish.
You are a writer (yes: only I know, and the whole town—you think you have kept this a secret, but everyone knows). I will tell you a story.
Here it goes: I was the princess, she the toad. This is how it starts, always in those fairy stories—I was beautiful, delicate, pretty, sweet—she dark, huge, hulking, defiant, no matter how many switches my father broke on her back. He hated her, hated. Took her out behind the tannery and beat her raw for the
slightest things. Since she was little, six five—for a broken mirror, for one fresh word. You should have seen them—my huge, furious father, my sister unmoving as a mule. She was always much larger than I—I was the little bird—my father loved me, everyone loved me. We slept, my sister and I, in the old haunted room in this house, the room haunted by my slave Grandmother Hetty (oh, don’t pretend you haven’t heard the rumors—yes, they’re true, every word—yes I came from slaves. One that your wonderful grandfather brought to town, yes? The good Quaker, the great Marmaduke. Hypocrite. That was one of the things they whispered about me at Godfrey’s funeral, yes, that I come from slaves? That my father looked too like the old landlord Marmaduke Temple for the town’s comfort? That perhaps our blood is not so dissimilar after all, my little plain friend? Oh, yes, I heard it, I heard it all).
We slept in Grandma Hetty’s haunted room. Ginger hurt me badly. She would tie me to the bedpost and pull until just before my arms popped from their sockets. She’d look up at me, calculating, cruel, stick a needle under my nails, push until I screamed.
Whenever my father caught her, he whipped her bloody. Always. My mother never said a word. Didn’t see, she was blind. Later, my father took Ginger behind the tannery to punish her, but there was no sign of whipping. At twelve, she was the size of a man, muscled like a man. She was good at work, Ginger, strong, could strip the skin from the fat in a bare second. At fourteen, she would slap me awake and force me from my bed. Down the stairs barefoot, out across the frosted lawn so cold it burnt my feet. Down to the tannery where she made me hold the lantern while the apprentices took their turns with her. One by one, in the stink of death and fat and hair, in that bloody place, one by one. She punished me—my punishment was to watch—her eyes gleaming, teeth bared, nightdress over her waist, her haunches, big, bare, muscled, gleaming in the light from the lantern I held—she’d snarl at me if I looked away. What the boys did to her, she did to me. She made me watch. But if one of them tried to touch me, she’d beat them hard. She made me watch.