Asking for Love

by Robinson, Roxana;

  While the others unloaded the car, I opened the house. This meant unlocking the back door from the outside and the front door from the inside. I always wanted to be the first person to enter the house in the summer. Carrying the key, I ran through the summer twilight. My bare feet knew the long springy grass of the unmown lawn, the narrow, rocky path down the side of the house, the splintery gray steps up to the back porch. The woods came right up to the back porch, and at night the raccoons made their secretive way up the steps to the scraps left out for them.

  I set the key into the heavy lock, twisted it, and pushed open the door. The kitchen was cool and gloomy, deeply silent. The refrigerator door stood coldly open, declaring its metal racks empty. The big green back-porch rockers sat tipsily on top of one another in an uproarious still life. In the dark pantry, glass-fronted cupboards rose up to the ceiling, stacked with my grandmother’s fluted white Wedgwood china. The rooms, as they always did, smelled of wood and wax. After the pantry’s gloom the dining room was a burst of light, with its pale, shining birchwood floor, its long wall of French doors facing the lake. In the living room the huge blackened granite fireplace was flanked by oak bookcases. A giant iron cauldron stood to one side, for firewood. Facing the hearth were overstuffed chairs in their baggy slipcovers, and the faded chintz sofa. The house was unchanged since my grandmother had arranged it.

  My bare feet made no sound on the polished floors, and moving through the silent rooms, I felt as though I were walking into the dense center of my family. I was breathing air that my family had breathed, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my father. I was seeing the same images—these same chairs in their baggy slipcovers, these old china lamps, this Toby jug on the mantelpiece—that my family had seen each summer for generations.

  Usually I liked this moment. Usually I felt as though I were somehow swimming into my own past, as though the whole liquid, transparent past of my family enveloped me, warm, comforting, nourishing. But this time it felt different. This year the house felt strange. The air seemed dense and heavy, and the rooms felt claustrophobic. I went straight to the front door without stopping, and when I unlocked the door and pulled open the heavy slab of oak, I stood still in the doorway, facing out of the house. The cool evening air, smelling of ferns and woods, swept into the house like a blessing.

  The next morning I went, early, down to the lake. The air was fresh and minty, and the narrow downhill path through the birches was soft and padded with leaf mold. The wooden boathouse was empty, and the floor echoed hollowly beneath my heels. I walked out onto the deck and took a slow breath, looking around. The lake, ringed by low, wooded hills, was calm and light-filled. I could smell the weathered, sun-baked planks beneath my feet. The air was still, and there was no sound anywhere. In the middle of the lake, far out on the shimmering water, two fishermen sat motionless in a flat-bottomed rowboat. A filmy white mist traced the green shoreline. I walked to the edge of the deck and looked down: the water was yellow-green and translucent. A narrow fish hovered over the sandy bottom, its fins rippling like transparent flags. The early sun was warm on my bare legs, and I sat down between the stiff wooden arms of the ladder. I closed my eyes: I could feel the summer about to begin.

  By the weekend I had met everyone my age who was there that year. Calvin Edgerley, fourteen, whom I already knew, was staying with his grandmother. This year Calvin’s older cousin was there too, Trowbridge Small. And one afternoon we rode our bicycles over to Betsy Jordan’s, whom the boys knew.

  The Jordans’ house was new. It was low and sleek, made of brick. Betsy’s mother opened the wide white-painted door. She had short blond hair, curled, and she wore a flowered terry-cloth shift with ruffled edges.

  “Hi, kids, come on in,” she said cheerfully. “Betsy’s here somewhere.” She called behind her: “Betsy!” She turned back and smiled at us. Her lips were clear curves of raspberry. “She’s doing her summer reading, so she’ll be thrilled to see you.”

  Betsy Jordan was wearing blue-jean cutoffs and a tank top. She held a book negligently in her hand, a finger stuck between the pages. Betsy was short and rounded, with neat limbs and easy gestures. Her face was covered with dark freckles and her hair was sleek, like an otter’s. She was completely relaxed, and I could see that she knew, just by instinct, how to be. I stared at her with admiration. At once I felt myself too lanky, long-boned, wrong.

  “Hi,” Betsy said. “Want something to drink?”

  In the kitchen we got Cokes, which were forbidden in our house. We went back to sit in the living room, and I looked around. We sat on low built-in sofas covered in bright red jittery prints. There were low glass tables with metal frames, and the white wall-to-wall rug was thick, like the fur of an animal. On the shiny white shelves against the wall were a stereo system and a huge television set. The white brick fireplace was raised off the floor. All of this seemed perfect to me, exactly the way a house should be.

  Trow, in tattered blue jeans, his hair falling across his eyes, sat next to Betsy. He leaned against her shoulder and pointed at her book.

  “So, whatchou up to, Bets?” he asked.

  “Villette,” Betsy said mournfully. “Brontë.”

  “Like it?” Trow asked, grinning.

  Betsy snorted lackadaisically and shook her head slowly. “Hate it,” she said. “Hate it.” She used the word casually, as though it were no different from any other.

  “Wait’ll you get Middlemarch,” Trow said, raising his eyebrows, grinning. He shook his head. “Woo-woo!”

  “Middlemarch,” Betsy said, wrinkling her nose. “Please. We read that last year. I hated it too.”

  I listened admiringly. At home I went to a church school, and no one talked like this. My parents did not allow complaints about schoolwork.

  “What do you have?” Calvin asked me. Calvin had a long, comic’s nose, pale skin, and fine dark hair.

  “Walden,” I said.

  “Henry David Thoreau-up,” said Calvin, and laughed loudly.

  “Where do you go?” Betsy asked me.

  “Farmington,” I said, proud. “I start this fall. Where do you?”

  “Concord Academy,” said Betsy, and I nodded knowledgeably.

  They were all older than me and already at boarding school. They told me elaborately how terrible it was. I listened, entranced. I could not imagine what it would be like. I was hoping for a new life, coarse and raucous: loud radios, friends who swore. I hoped we would all laugh behind the housemother’s back, uncharitably, without remorse.

  Sitting on the jazzy red sofa, with a Coke bottle in my hand, listening to them criticize the grown-up world, I was proud. I thought we looked like a photograph of teenagers in a magazine. This was what teenagers did, I thought, and I myself was doing it. I was one of them, a member of this elect and glamorous group.

  Of course I knew that there were things I had to conceal from them, things that would reveal me as an impostor. For one thing, there was the fact that I liked to read. I had already read the Brontës, on my own, and I liked the books on the summer reading list. For another thing, there was my hideous, unacceptable old house and my virtuous, unacceptable family. But I thought I could keep my two worlds apart, and that I could keep these things hidden. And in the meantime, here I was, sitting in this golden group, holding a Coke. Two boys sat next to me, clowning. Betsy rolled her eyes languidly, and the boys laughed. I felt I had entered a charmed land. I thought that I had never been so happy. I thought my new life had already started.

  Later in the month, I lay one afternoon in the big canvas hammock on the porch. I was reading Walden, and from time to time I put my hand underneath the hammock and gave myself a slow, peaceful push against the stone parapet. Below me, the wooded hillside was quiet, and the lake was calm. Far out in the middle was a single figure, paddling slowly in a silver canoe.

  When I heard the knock on the front door I stopped reading, wondering. No car had come up the hill. My mother’s footsteps crossed
the polished floor.

  “Why, hello!” my mother said to someone, effusive. “Come right in.”

  I heard a muffled, unidentifiable voice.

  “She’s right outside,” my mother said. “Come with me. She’ll be so glad to see you.”

  I sat up, appalled. I was wearing stained green shorts and an old, too-tight jersey. Worse, I was here in the house: the huge, blackened fireplace, the humped, flowered, monolithic chairs, the faded oriental rugs, the absent television. There was no Coke in the refrigerator and never had been. I was caught, trapped, in these clothes and in this house.

  “Alison,” my mother called, “you have a guest.”

  The screen door opened and Gloria stood there, a bundle in her arms.

  “I come to play,” she announced, and smiled, showing her flat front teeth.

  I stared at her.

  “I brought my bathing suit,” Gloria added, holding up the bundle.

  “Good,” said my mother brightly, looking at me. “That’s good. You can go down to the lake together for a swim. How about that, Alison?”

  I was speechless.

  The afternoon had, in a stroke, turned bleak and endless. Hours and hours lay before me, locked in Gloria’s company. I would have to talk to Gloria. I would have to listen. And Gloria’s presence, I knew, would ruin me. Everything I had built up, all the teenagerness, whatever borrowed glamour I had managed to acquire from the group, would all be destroyed by Gloria’s presence. My true colors would be revealed, and I could never recover from this. Even if no one saw me, even if no one knew, a contamination would take place. I would be subtly expelled. The others would make plans, they would do things together, and they would not call me. They would expect me to spend the day with Gloria. It was the end of my new life.

  Gloria looked diffidently at my mother. “Ma says I’m not to go to the boathouse, because it costs you. She says we can go down into the woods.”

  My mother looked awkward. “Oh,” she said, blinking behind the colorless glasses. “Oh, that doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about that.”

  “No,” Gloria said firmly, shaking her head. “Ma says I have to swim from the woods, I can’t go to the boathouse.”

  There was a pause, and my mother nodded. “All right. There’s a path that goes down to the lake on our property.” She thought for a moment. “How old are you, Gloria?”

  “Nearly twelve,” Gloria said, proud.

  I would be spending the afternoon with an eleven-year-old.

  “And are you a good swimmer?” asked my mother.

  “Not real good,” Gloria said cheerfully.

  “All right, then,” said my mother. “Ted can go down with the two of you. Just to be on the safe side. He can take a book. The two of you can swim.” She stood, smiling, surrounding us with warmth and approval.

  Where would we swim? I wondered bitterly. Back and forth in the shallows, trying not to touch the muddy, squishy, loathsome, monster-filled bottom? By this time, that side of the lake was in shadow, and the water would be chill. And there was no clearing on the bank, nowhere to spread a towel, nowhere to sit but nettles. Ted would be no help; he would bring his book and say nothing.

  We changed into bathing suits in my room. Gloria’s suit was babyish, with smocking across the front and rows of ruffles across her rump. We went down the path, me in front. “The briers are bad this year,” I called back in a grand way. I was trying to suggest some kind of superior knowledge, a connoisseurship of briers. I hoped Ted would answer, but Gloria did.

  “Yee-ah,” she said. She giggled loudly, then screamed as a thorn ripped a white line along her arm. “Ow,” she explained. I turned off onto the faint trail down to our landing. The briers were worse here. Behind me Gloria shouted good-naturedly at each hostile touch.

  At the water’s edge, we put our towels down on bushes. Ted, who didn’t care, sat down with his book among the brush.

  “I’ll go first,” I said. I began to wade cautiously out into the cool water. Goose bumps appeared suddenly up and down my arms. The lake bottom was famously awful, and cold black ooze came up between my toes. I stepped on slime-covered rocks, slippery and unsteady. I kept my head down, trying to see into the sunless green depths.

  Behind me Gloria screamed loudly with every step. “Oh my God,” she said, over and over.

  When the water reached my waist, I looked up. The silver canoe I had seen before was coming in from the middle of the lake. It was a new aluminum one, with a girl paddling. It was headed past us, toward the boathouse. The girl wore a sleek black tank suit, like Betsy’s.

  I started walking more steadily through the cobbly ooze, pushing urgently through the water, toward the canoe. The girl was watching me. She slowed her stroke and slightly changed her course. As she came closer I could see the flicked-up nose, the sleek wet head. It was Betsy.

  I waved at her, lurching, trying to hurry through the heavy water. I could hear Gloria, now way behind me, shrieking in the shallow water.

  “Betsy!” I called.

  Betsy paused, her paddle lifted. Out where she was, the lake was still lit by the long late-afternoon light. The canoe was radiant on the glassy water, and long silver loops slid off the paddle.

  “Betsy! It’s me!” I called. “Alison!”

  I threw myself forward into the water and began swimming. Betsy hesitated, then turned the canoe toward me with a long, strong stroke that sent the boat skidding across the water. I swam toward her, flailing my arms and splashing wildly. When I reached the canoe, I kicked myself up out of the water in a flurry, rising up and reaching for the gunwale. I grabbed it as though I were drowning, as though I were desperate and the canoe were a lifeboat.

  “Go,” I said urgently. “Just go. Quick.”

  Without asking, Betsy began paddling again. The canoe, clumsy with my awkward weight, swung back away from shore and headed for the boathouse. I clung to its cold, pale side and stared at the normal life going on at the boathouse: the bored lifeguard lounging in his canvas chair, his white hat pulled down over his eyes. Small children shouted in the shallows.

  I didn’t once look behind me, where Ted would be sitting among the bushes, his head now raised from his book, watching me, unsurprised. I didn’t look back to see Gloria, who would be standing in the muddy shallows, quiet, no longer shrieking, staring at her cousin. Hanging on to the smooth, chill metal, my teeth chattering, I fixed my gaze ahead, as though I could put my family behind me forever, as though I would never have to look at them again.

  Sleepover

  “Lean over,” her mother said, scrubbing at the child’s milky skin. Bess bent her head over the sink, stretching her leg out straight behind. She craned her head around, trying to see the back of her own knee. Bess was seven.

  “Would you be able to see it yet?” she asked her mother. “Could you see the red? I think it itches.”

  “You probably didn’t even get it,” her mother said. “This is just in case.”

  “But I was near it,” said Bess. “I saw it. I might have touched it and not remembered. I might have touched it before I saw.”

  “There,” said her mother, and stood up. The back of Bess’s knee was covered with calamine lotion, a great, chalky, pink-white island. Bess straightened and then bent her leg, lifting her foot behind her in a slow, hypnotized gesture as she felt the tautness of the dried lotion on her skin. She looked up at her mother and smiled, her eyes focused inward, concentrating on the sensation. “It feels like a balloon when you touch it. Tight and squeaky.”

  Her mother screwed the top back on the calamine lotion. “I used to spend the summer covered with this stuff,” she said. “I used to get poison ivy every day.”

  “Every day?” asked Bess, distracted from her back-of-the-knee experience. “Every single day?”

  “Maybe not every day,” said her mother, “but nearly.” She turned suddenly theatrical, and her voice dropped, urgent and mysterious. “Ve-ry nearly,” she whispered to Bess, the
words—absurd, nonsensical—transformed by her delivery into code, a message about unknown danger. Bess laughed, her mouth slightly open, her eyes unguarded. She watched her mother’s face as she would a movie screen: rapt, expectant, ingenuous, waiting for splendor.

  The bathroom, flooded with late-afternoon light, was suffused with a feeling of intimacy. Bess leaned easily against the porcelain sink with its deep blue stain. Everything in this room was familiar to her. Everything here was part of Bess’s life within her family, everything proof of her mother’s presence. Here was the soupy oval of soap in its dish, the soft, fraying towels, hanging neatly folded on their long wooden bars. Her father’s huge terry-cloth bathrobe stretched its heavy folds on the hook behind the door; on top of it was her mother’s pink cotton robe, with a white lace frill along its entire front. The pink tiles with their darkened lines of grout, the faint moldiness of the translucent shower curtain, the peeling paint on the window frame over the bathtub—everything suggested steam, warmth, privacy. Here was safety.

  Bess, staring at her mother, waited for more. This was an unexpected image: her mother as a child in the long summer evenings, galloping through thickets of dense green, immersed in her own secret plans, heedless of risk. Bess hoped for more gypsy, more wildness, more of this strange vision of her mother as unreliable, irresponsible. Someone with a secret life.

  Bess waited, watching the smooth oval of her mother’s face, the neat rim of bangs that covered her forehead, the two thin beautiful lines that marked where her smile would be. She was hoping for more of this, but her mother was finished. She put the calamine bottle back on the shelf and with a soft multiple click closed the medicine cabinet door. She turned away, and Bess, seeing the signs, began to hop.

  “It itches,” Bess said warningly. “Already. I remember that Sammy pushed me. He might have pushed me right in it.”