by T. Greenwood
It is a quiet night, only a few other regulars. It’s that strange time of night after the daytime drunks have stumbled home but before the younger crowd shows up. Chester’s caters to the locals: bikers and surfers and old broads like me. Lined up at the open window like painted clown heads in an arcade game, we tend to keep the tourists away. I like to sit and watch the people go by, the colorful parade of characters who live here. It is dusk now, the sun retired for the night, the moon stepping in to do the job of illuminating the surf.
“How long’s it been since you’ve been back east?” Juan asks, as he gathers up the empty bottles from an abandoned table.
“To Vermont? About five years. But I haven’t been back to the lake since ’64,” I say, realizing for the first time how very long ago that was. Juan probably wasn’t even born yet in 1964.
Juan is single, divorced, but girls like him. A group of women who work at the salon next door come in and flirt with him. He humors them, but that is all. He, like me, lives alone. He has a ten-year-old son who lives with his mother in Arizona. He shows me pictures on his phone sometimes, and I can see how much he misses him.
“You need a ride to the airport?” he asks.
I had thought I’d call a shuttle after I got home, one of those blue vans you always see zipping along the road. “Oh, you don’t need to do that,” I say.
“I’m up early anyway,” he says. “What time do you need to get there?”
“Six, I think. My flight’s at eight.”
“I’ll be at your place at five thirty,” he says, and before I have time to protest, he winks and disappears behind the bar again to take someone’s order.
I’ve been so consumed with the details of this trip that I haven’t spent too much time ruminating on the conversation with Gussy, at my irritation at being coerced. I suppose I could have just said no, refused her aggressive generosity, but I’ve never been able to say no to Gussy. And so instead, I measured out my liquids into three-ounce plastic containers. I bought a new, warm jacket. I printed my boarding pass at the library, double-checked with Linda that she and the library would be okay without me for a couple of weeks. (She insisted, but still I worry.) I stopped my paper, asked the post office to hold my mail, and rescheduled a dentist appointment I’d forgotten was coming up. I let my friends and neighbors know that I’ll be gone.
Gussy said that Johnny will be driving up from Boston on the Sunday morning after I get there. That means only a couple of days to settle in. It makes me uneasy, though I know it’s the whole reason for the trip to begin with. I try to imagine what he looks like now, and I can’t help but think of Ted. I wonder if he still looks like his father. As a child, he was his spitting image, as though Ted had made him all on his own. But sometimes children grow out of their parents’ faces, leaving that influence, that impression behind.
I leave Juan a generous tip, as I always do, and wave to him from the doorway as I head out to go back to my cottage and try to get some sleep before the morning comes. “Five thirty,” he hollers. “Bright and early.”
I am thinking of Eva as I walk from the bar back to my cottage. She is in the swaying palm trees, in the moon, in the receding tide. I hear her voice in the tinkling wind chimes that hang from my porch, feel her touch in the breeze. It’s funny—Frankie was my husband for years, we raised a family together, I saw him at his finest, and I saw him at his worst, but when I try to picture him, the physical embodiment of him, the man, my memory fails. I remember his outbursts, and occasionally his tenderness. But when I try to picture his face, his hands, I’m at a loss. It’s as though the years have eviscerated him, leaving only the pale skeleton behind. Even Lou, who was my constant companion for nearly twenty-five years, is shadowy now. A whisper. An echo. But the picture of Eva is brilliant. Everything about her stands out in vivid relief from the blur of the rest of my past: the scent of her hair, the way her dark irises were rimmed in green. The three freckles on the back of her neck. Tonight, when I get to the cottage and put my key in the lock, for a moment I swear I smell her White Shoulders perfume, that lily of the valley, lilac scent. But it is only the hydrangea that blooms in optimistic puffs in the hedge by my front porch.
As I close my bag and set it by the door, as I check my itinerary again, I have to assure myself that I am capable of making this journey. Even without the prospect of seeing Johnny again after all these years, this would be a daunting voyage. In my old age, the simplest trips have begun to feel epic: a walk down the pier, a drive through rush-hour traffic, and now flying home. It makes me think about my daughters’ Girl Scout badges, the tasks and accomplishments it took to earn them. Cooking, Animal Raising, Folk Dancing. I wonder what sort of badge I might earn for this. What the embroidered emblem would be: an airplane, a lake, a broken heart.
It was my idea to get Eva to become a Scout leader with me. I had led Francesca’s troop the year before, mostly because no other mothers wanted the job. This year, Mouse was eligible to join, and I’d already promised her I’d lead again. The year before I’d had seven girls from the neighborhood who all met in my basement once a week. It had been a chaos of arts and crafts and cooking and camping. This year only three of them were flying up to Girl Scouts, and so I’d been convinced to lead a combined group of Girl Scouts and Brownies, with two new little ones joining. After a couple of months of trying to do it on my own that fall of 1960, I realized I needed help (planning the meetings, wrangling the inevitable couple of wayward Brownies, and orchestrating the annual camping trip to Rippling River Campground in the spring). And I suspected that it might be a good distraction for Eva, an excuse to get out of the house.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What will I do with Johnny and Rose?”
“Bring them along. We can set up a playpen in the basement. Johnny can watch TV upstairs. It’s only once a week. It’ll be fun!”
Eva lay on her couch, flipping through the Brownie Scout Handbook, the beloved Bible of scouting.
“You can help with the Arts and Crafts,” I said, smiling and pointing to the table of contents.
She rolled her eyes.
I still had difficulty imagining Eva’s life as an art student in San Francisco. There was no evidence in their home that she had ever been anything other than a mother and wife; the only artwork adorning their walls was a Grandma Moses print of children ice skating and Wyeth’s Christina’s World above the fireplace. We had the same print ourselves, though ours was above our couch, something Frankie had snatched up at a tag sale.
“What kind of things did you paint?” I asked. “When you were in school?”
“I wasn’t a painter,” she said. “I was a sculptor.”
“Like the Venus de Milo?” I asked, thinking of all those pale, armless ruins I’d seen only in our Encyclopaedia Britannica.
She shook her head. “No, not that kind of sculpture. Mobiles, mostly. Have you ever heard of George Rickey? Alexander Calder?”
I hadn’t.
“Oh, Calder’s wonderful, Billie,” she said, her eyes brightening. She sat up and leaned forward. “He makes these enormous mobiles. They’re made of metal, but they look like birds in flight, absolutely weightless. They’ll take your breath away. I’ll have to take you to see his work sometime.”
“Why don’t you make them anymore?” I asked.
Eva looked down at the Brownie handbook in her hands and shook her head. Then she brushed her hand in the air, as though dismissing the thought like a sluggish, buzzing housefly.
Eva was like this sometimes, like the bottles of homemade root beer Frankie made in the basement. She’d pop open with excitement, her entire body buzzing and fizzing, and then, just as suddenly, she’d close up again, everything gone flat.
“Let’s start with spatter prints,” she said. “We can use some of those pretty maple leaves. Do a nature walk and then the art project. Two birds.” When she lifted her head to look at me for my approval, her eyes were glossy.
Mouse, who hated
dresses and skirts, who battled with me each and every morning over what she would wear to school, loved her Brownie uniform. For two years she’d coveted that plain, little brown dress. She’d even loved the tiny beanie, wearing Chessy’s around the house when Chessy would let her. Once she had her very own, bought at the Methodist church rummage sale, she refused to take it off. She memorized all of the songs, the salute, and the Brownie Scout Promise (I promise to do my best to love God and my country, to help other people every day, especially those at home) long before the first meeting. I probably could have allowed her to run the meetings and spared Eva and me the trouble.
On meeting days, Eva and I walked to the school to pick all of the girls up, and then we marched back to my house, where I had usually prepared a snack for them to eat before setting about Scout business.
Frankie refused to allow that many little girls in the main part of the house, and so we were banished to the basement. I couldn’t help but feel like we were part of some sort of underground organization. Literally. Our basement was enormous, cavernous, a footprint of the entire house, though only half of it was finished. Frankie had his workshop in the basement, where he kept his tools and the salvaged furniture he was restoring as well as a healthy stash of jug wine. My washing machine was down there as well, and a tub where Frankie made homemade root beer. He’d rescued an industrial-size freezer from a restaurant that was going out of business in the North End and that is where we kept the meat I bought on sale at DeMoulas each week. The other part of the cellar, the cold cellar, was where I kept my canning supplies and all the vegetables from Frankie’s garden that we harvested and canned. The finished part of the basement had wide pine paneling and thin, green carpet. Frankie had furnished the room with two sofas he found at the dump and a wide, low coffee table that was perfect for crafts. There was something serious and solemn about those basement meetings. In the cool, damp darkness, we all felt a bit transported from our normal lives. This was our own little Brownie world.
Eva was a big help, but she was restless. The spring camping trip wasn’t until Memorial Day weekend, and she quickly grew bored with our subterranean (and mostly domestic) activities.
“We should take the girls on an adventure. I bet the Boy Scouts aren’t sitting around doing cross-stitch. Shouldn’t we be scouting?”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. We could go apple picking or something. At least get them outside.”
There was a farm just on the outskirts of town that had orchards. In the fall, you could go there for hay rides and to pick apples and pumpkins from the pumpkin patch. They had a small petting zoo as well. It was November, a little late in the season, but it had been unseasonably warm this fall, as though winter weren’t right around the corner, and so we figured we’d give it a shot.
However, in order to take such a field trip, we’d need two cars. Ted refused to allow Eva to use his Cadillac (worried, I suppose, about so many girls and his expensive upholstery), and so, reluctantly, I solicited Hannah Flannigan’s help. Because, despite being generally irritating and particularly rude, she had a girl in Scouts and a station wagon too. I made sure to warn Eva ahead of time about Hannah, feeling compelled to apologize for any asinine thing that came from her mouth in advance.
We loaded all of the girls into our two cars that Sunday after church and headed to the farm, but when we pulled into the dirt parking lot it was empty. Eva got out of the car and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Hannah and I watched her as she made her way to the entrance. There was a sign nailed to the gate, but I couldn’t read it from where we were.
She came running back to my car. “They’re closed,” she said, and a collective groan issued forth from the gaggle of girls in the backseat.
Hannah rolled down her window. “I knew it was too late in the season,” she said.
“Oh well,” I offered to Eva and the girls. “Maybe next year.”
“I say we go anyway,” Eva said.
Hannah’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, who’s going to care if we pick a few apples?” she said. “Girls, come on!”
The doors opened, and the girls spilled out of the cars, but Hannah remained motionless in the driver’s seat of her car. “That’s trespassing. You cannot possibly condone this,” she said to me.
Francesca looked worried, but Eva was already back at the gate, climbing over the fence. She looked back at us and motioned for me to follow.
I buzzed with excitement. “Come on, Chessy. It’ll be fun.”
Chessy looked terribly torn, and Hannah folded her arms across her chest. For one brief moment I had the odd thought that Chessy could have been Hannah’s daughter, the grim expressions on their faces so similar. Hannah’s own daughter was about to get out of the car, but Hannah reached behind her and pushed the door lock down. “We’ll wait right here,” she said firmly. “But if the police come, don’t expect me to be your getaway car.”
Reluctantly Chessy followed me, and I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “It’ll be fun. Don’t worry.”
The orchard was not far from the front gate. It was late in the season, and rotten apples littered the ground. The ones that remained on the trees were overripe and hanging low. There were a few Baldwins though, winter apples, that were perfect. There weren’t any baskets or boxes for the fruit, so Eva told the girls to put them in their pockets and she gathered hers in a cradle made of her skirt.
The girls, even Chessy, were having so much fun, eating the apples they couldn’t carry and chasing each other through the tidy rows of trees. This could have gone on all afternoon if the farmer hadn’t heard the noise and come running from his house, which was only about a hundred yards from the orchard. He was fat, stuffed into a pair of overalls, and he practically toppled over as he ran toward us. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
Eva stood with nearly a quarter bushel of apples in her skirt. I thought she might try to charm him, to explain. But instead she said, “Run, girls!” And all of us started to sprint toward the front gate, apples tumbling behind us as we ran. The farmer couldn’t keep up and simply shook his head as we all hurdled the fence and dashed into the cars, breathless with laughter.
Hannah looked as though she might have some sort of attack as she peeled out of the parking lot. Eva and I collapsed in the front seat of my car, roaring with laughter. Even Chessy was smiling. I turned around and winked at her.
“Terrific. You’ve turned our Girl Scouts into common criminals,” Hannah said later. “I hope you’re proud of yourselves.”
Life was simply more exciting with Eva around. No one could argue that, not even Chessy.
Eva’s first winter in New England was everything I’d promised when she first moved in across the street, and she was (as expected) ill-prepared for the blustery wind and bitter cold. We were both grateful, I think, to have the excuse of the Scouts to spend time together when we normally would have been stuck inside our respective homes. The biggest scouting event of the year was the annual camping trip to the Rippling River Campground in May. Planning for this trip (preparing survival lessons, creating nature-related arts and crafts projects, and simply managing the logistics of a weekend sleepover with nine girls) occupied many of those dark and chilly afternoons. And while we typed up our lessons and made shopping lists, we got to know each other. Our friendship, like a hothouse flower, grew despite the bitter cold outside.
By the time spring finally came along, Rose was able to pull herself up in the playpen we set up in the basement. By then the colic had stopped as well, thank God, and she had actually become a fairly quiet child. I could see the tension that had resided in Eva’s face and shoulders slowly disappearing, melting like the stubborn snow at the edges of the road.
The older girls had earned badges for First Aid, Arts at Home, and Puppets. Mouse coveted these patches, the ones I helped sew onto the Girl Scouts’ sash
es. She had three more years to go to her own bridging ceremony in which she would “fly up” from Brownie to Scout. For the older girls, the camping trip was their opportunity to earn the coveted Go Camping badge. Mouse was beside herself with envy.
The camping trip was scheduled for Memorial Day weekend. Ted’s sister, Mary, was coming from Boston to watch Johnny and Rose for the weekend.
“He can’t handle two nights without you?” I asked.
“Of course he can, he just won’t,” Eva said.
Unlike some other women friends I had, we didn’t usually talk about our husbands with each other. We didn’t get together to complain or commiserate. We didn’t gossip about them over coffee or cocktails. They rarely entered our conversations at all. It wasn’t that we didn’t have our gripes; I certainly did. With any other woman I might have lamented Frankie’s many, many faults: the little things, like his insistence on bringing home things from the dump, the way we never had anything new. Or the big things, like his drinking and his temper: the way he could, with a single sentence, crush Francesca’s or Mouse’s feelings; the way he used his words like fists when he was drunk and angry. I supposed we had a lot in common when it came to this; we could have whispered the sour smell of Frankie’s and Ted’s breath. Their insistent hands and hips. We could have cried on each other’s shoulders about the strange relief and simultaneous loneliness of the nights when Ted and Frankie went out with work buddies for drinks, the reprieve of their absence coupled with the fear of their getting in an accident on the way home. Of what would happen to us if one of them didn’t come home. We could have consoled each other; we could have shared our sorrow like a box of donuts.
But there was something unspoken between Eva and me, a wonderful silent understanding, that our time together was time when we didn’t have to think or talk about our husbands. There was something special about our friendship; it wasn’t based on our mutual misery. It was independent of our husbands. Independent, even, of our children. And so instead, throughout that long, cold winter, we had talked about books, and art, and music. We shared records, making each other sit and listen to our respective collections on the hi-fi. I was partial to the schmaltzy stuff: Perry Como and Jo Stafford and Kate Smith (my favorite). Eva’s taste tended to be more eclectic and refined. She loved jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Eva was head over heels over Sam Cooke, swooned as the needle dropped. Sometimes we danced, swiveling our hips to Chubby Checker until we were sweaty and breathless. Sometimes we smoked cigarettes and listened to Chet Baker, dreaming ourselves elsewhere.