“No,” I said, giving my father a kiss on the cheek.
“Sorry about that,” I said in the car.
“About what?”
“The waving,” I said.
“Not a problem,” said Ted.
We arrived at Walden just before sunset. A breeze carried the scent of pine needles and pond. People were speckled across the beach, leaning back on blankets and chairs, layering on T-shirts and shorts over swimsuits as it cooled. I wondered what Ted and I looked like walking together. Did people wonder what I was doing here with this handsome, older guy? Or did they wonder what he was doing here with me?
Ted was telling me about his research, how in the early 1700s a minuteman had lived on the Wayside property, how in the late 1700s enemy troops had marched right past on their way to the Old North Bridge. I kept saying “Cool” and “Wow” as if I had no other vocabulary.
We walked past Thoreau’s cabin, which might have been the only place in the Greater Boston area smaller than my father’s apartment. It had a sign out front: I WENT TO THE WOODS BECAUSE I WISHED TO LIVE DELIBERATELY, TO FRONT ONLY THE ESSENTIAL FACTS OF LIFE.
The essential facts of life? What were they? Thoreau had never been a seventeen-year-old girl.
We sat down on the sand. I zigzagged my finger up and down the space next to me, hardly leaving a trail because the sand caved in on itself. A hazy reflection of pine trees and low, pink clouds floated in the water. The sun bubbled over the tree line.
“Hey,” Ted said, taking my hand. When I looked at him, he looked at me right back. Right in the eyes. “This is nice, right?” I wanted to look away, look out into the water or at the children building fortresses in the sand. “You know why I invited you here?” he asked. I shook my head no. “It’s because you’re funny,” he said. “Plus, you’re pretty cute.”
“Come on,” I said, still zigzagging my finger through the sand. “We all know Julie’s the cute one.”
“I mean, sure, she’s attractive,” Ted said seriously. “But I don’t know. You aren’t trying so fucking hard.” Ironic, because I felt like I was trying pretty hard. “Julie thinks she’s special,” said Ted, “but you’re oblivious to how special you are.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
After sunset, we sat in his car. I was so nervous that I could feel my hands shaking. When we kissed, I felt light-headed and robotic. Where was my tongue supposed to go? What was I supposed to do with his tongue, which was in my mouth? What about this buildup of spit? Was I messing everything up? I was, wasn’t I?
When our faces parted I was blushing, but Ted pretended not to notice.
When he put his hand on my thigh, near the edge of my dress, I went stiff.
“Hold on,” I said.
“What?” he said. He didn’t take his hand away.
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?” he asked.
The truth was, I hadn’t bargained for more than a kiss, and I didn’t know how to proceed. Maybe Julie had predicted this. Of course he wanted more than a kiss. He’d probably been with dozens of women. He’d lived two of my lives. He was old enough to be married, divorced, and married again.
I wondered what my parents would think if they knew I was here. Maybe nothing. This is exactly what my father expected from a guy. What about James? What would he think?
“Julie just—I don’t know,” I said. “She thought it was a bad idea. Like, because…I don’t know. Well, you’re older than me, I think.”
“You came here for a reason,” he said. “I guarantee Julie is fucking with you because of her own shit. You’re an adult, May. You can make your own decisions.”
Maybe he really didn’t know how old I was. Regardless, I didn’t feel like an adult. When someone referred to me as a woman, I looked around to see who they were talking about.
“You just need to relax,” said Ted. “Don’t let Julie make your decisions for you.”
I did need to relax. I needed to reset, try again when I wasn’t so nervous. “We should probably leave anyway,” I said, looking out the window at the emptying parking lot.
“That’s what you want?” he asked. “Your decision,” he said. He waited until I nodded to take his hand off my leg.
When I got home that night, my mother was sitting at the table, which was set for dinner with utensils and two blue cloth placemats. “Hey,” I said. Only when she didn’t respond did I notice that her cheeks were glistening under our fluorescent kitchen light. She was staring out the window, oblivious to my presence. I didn’t want to move or speak again, for fear of alarming her.
But finally, quietly, I asked, “Are you okay?”
“Your brother”—how quickly a heart stops—“is getting married.”
My whole body seemed to go soft. I wanted to melt into the kitchen floor or get down on my knees and thank the Lord I didn’t really believe in or smack my mother’s wet cheek. My mother sobbed, a hand covering the side of her face nearer me, as if that would prevent me from seeing or hearing her.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Who’s he marrying?”
She kept crying and then stopped with the noise of a stalled car, grabbing a napkin and wiping her face, still not looking at me. “A woman in the army,” she said. “He’s really gone, May,” she said. “He’s not coming back.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “His tour’s almost over!” But the relief I’d felt a moment earlier had already disappeared.
One afternoon at the visitors’ center, Audrey took the jar of pickles from her brown paper bag to make sure the lid was screwed on. One of the visitors laughed. “I used to bring jars of pickles like that to work when I was pregnant with my first,” she said. “People thought I was crazy.”
Audrey’s eyes flashed. “I am not pregnant!” she shouted. “Simply because I am overweight and twenty-seven does not mean I am having a child or am married or have a boyfriend. I’m single, and I want to be single! Can’t anyone just accept that I like pickles?”
I had never seen Audrey like this before. The handful of other visitors in the room looked down at their feet. The lady who had spoken took a cautious step backward. “That’s fine,” she said. “That’s fine.”
Audrey looked around at everyone not looking at her. “What?” she cried, and then she walked right out the door.
“Um,” I announced. “The next tour will begin in approximately thirty-five minutes. Audrey, the tour guide, is having a rough day, but she’ll be better after lunch, I’m sure.” Then I left to find Audrey, who was sitting on the front lawn, eating her pickles fiercely, juice flying everywhere.
“Audrey!” I yelled.
“What?” said Audrey, taking another savage bite. “You’re supposed to be in the visitors’ center! Did you put up the sign? It’s my lunch break now!” She looked like she was going to continue speaking, but instead she stopped, ate the remaining half of a pickle in one bite, and wiped her mouth with her arm.
“You’re scaring away the visitors, Audrey! Nobody said you were pregnant. God!”
“Fuck you,” said Audrey.
She wiped the wet edges of each eye with her wrist, which only made them appear wetter because her temples were now slicked with pickle juice. “My twelfth rejection,” she said. “Count them! Count to twelve! You can’t! You don’t have enough fingers!”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
She didn’t look at me, seemed to be speaking to the air. “I’ll never be a broadcast journalist. I’m too fat.” It occurred to me that even if Audrey had been overweight when I met her—and that was debatable—she certainly wasn’t anymore. She was getting thin and, perhaps, even green.
“I thought you were going to be a writer-journalist,” I said.
She snorted. “I am,” she said. “I’m going to write my stories, and then broadcast them. But not if I don’t get a job! Not if I’ve been rejected by twelve stations! And I’m not pregnant! There is absolutely no possible w
ay I will ever be pregnant!”
“You can’t get pregnant?” I asked.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to end up just like Christine, I know it. If I ever get a job, it will all end up that way.”
I didn’t know who Christine was, but I knew Audrey had a habit of referring to famous people as near acquaintances, like her good friends Louisa and Nathaniel. “Christine?” I asked, taking the bait.
“Christine Chubbuck! A woman you would know if you had any interest at all in broadcast journalism!”
I had almost no interest at all in broadcast journalism.
“She committed suicide on live television during her broadcast. She was twenty-nine and lonely and depressed and she never dated and she told everyone she was going to kill herself, and then she did, on live television. At least she became famous!” Audrey stuffed an entire, final pickle in her mouth, and it snapped in two on its way in. Then she crumbled the brown paper bag into a ball and just sat there. I returned to an empty visitors’ center.
I followed Audrey on her next tour, to make sure she was okay. In the Sky Parlor, one of the tourists asked why the shades were drawn. Audrey explained it beautifully, fully composed and without a trace of her earlier outburst. A woman wanted to touch Hawthorne’s desk, and even though the meaning of a velvet rope should have been obvious, Audrey calmly explained why no one could touch the desk. “Not even the staff who work here have touched it,” she said. I wondered if that was true, if Audrey or James had never touched the desk they so admired, if they had ever hoped that luck, directly from the site of creation, could rub off on them.
Ted picked me up a block from my mom’s house, at a place he probably assumed was my actual address. I’d never done this sort of thing in high school, and I felt like I was getting something essential out of the way.
We went to a diner Julie and I had long ago deemed far too unkitsch, with its dearth of aluminum and its boring white linoleum tabletops. I’d already eaten, so I just ordered a Diet Coke and fries. Ted ordered a massive two-patty hamburger with sweet potato fries, coleslaw, and a side salad.
“You think you have enough food there?” I asked, trying to be funny and flirty and casual, or whatever I was supposed to be.
He nodded. “Gotta watch out, though,” he said, tapping his stomach. “Not so young anymore.”
I split my fries into pieces so I would eat them slowly, sucking the salt and grease from each piece before eating the next. Ted was talking about his graduate program, how museum studies was housed in three different departments, how his department was really the most important.
I spent most of the meal feeling grateful that he was still hanging out with me. I asked him questions about the program, hoping to avoid talking about myself. I was afraid that anything I might say—about living with my mom, about dinners with my dad, about going away to college—would either reveal to him or remind him of my youth. I managed to remind him anyway as I stacked the butter pats into a four-walled tower. “Cute,” he said.
We made out in the car, but it still didn’t feel natural. I kept changing the position of my hands, first putting them on his shoulders like I was slow dancing, then moving them to his back.
“You’re very pretty,” he whispered in my ear. “You just gotta let go a little bit.”
This was probably true. I probably did have to let go. I let his hands creep up my thigh, up my shirt, to the back of my bra, which I felt click open.
“Wait,” I said.
“For what?” he whispered.
“Not now,” I said. Was this really how fast adults went?
“When, though?” he said.
“Really,” I said, moving away from him, trying and failing to clip my bra back together with one hand.
Ted put his hands on the steering wheel and stared out the front window. “You know,” he said, “I want to be honest with you. I kinda feel like I’m being jerked around. Like you want the attention, but then you back away. Which, where does that leave me? What do I get from that?”
Why was I always in the passenger seat of a car, feeling like a kid in trouble? One of us had misjudged my potential. I felt like I was being dropped off at the bottom of the Alps when I was still learning to ride a bike. What I wanted was to go slower, but you didn’t ask a thirty-whatever if he would go slower. You just had to catch up, pretend you were right there the whole time.
He started the car. “I like you, obviously,” he said. “I wouldn’t be hanging out with you if I didn’t. But you have to make a decision about what you want.” He lowered the hand brake and started backing out of the parking space. “Because other people get tired,” he said. “Their interest wanes.”
What was I supposed to do? I thought of the lifetime I’d spent listening to advice from my parents and teachers and friends, from song lyrics and TV shows and movies: Go for it. Just say no. Seize the day. Trust your instincts. What was my instinct? I felt like a deer in headlights, trapped in the middle of the road, unwilling to go forward or back.
Was there really middle ground here? We weren’t going to go “part way.” It was not, as they say, horseshoes and hand grenades. It was more like: you either passed a test or you failed it, you won a game or you lost it, you were a virgin or you weren’t.
All of a sudden it hit me, what Audrey had really meant by saying she couldn’t be pregnant.
James decided to take me on a “one-on-one practice tour.” He said I’d “gotten the facts and stories” and he wanted to work on “the nuances.” On our way around the house, he talked about his life, still smiling: a wife who had long ago died of cancer, a grown son who visited often, his writing career which hadn’t, just yet, taken off. “Can you really be this happy?” I asked him again.
“Why can’t you believe that? Tell me: you’re so young and why can’t you believe that?” Something was bothering me. Something about how he was always smiling, about how he seemed to believe that “and”—that words at all—could ward off negativity like a cast spell. I told James I’d seen him on the ladder, that I knew he couldn’t’ve been happy then. “But when you came down to unlock the visitors’ center, you didn’t know I’d seen and you were whistling again, just like that! Wasn’t that fake?”
“I don’t want to bring down morale here. The gutters, the peeling paint, the shades—they bring down morale enough.” He nodded to himself. “I can see how my smile might feel like a lie to you, and—”
“But,” I said.
“And,” he said with a laugh, “I don’t mean it like that. For me it’s…aspirational.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“I’m glad we’ve had this summer to get to know each other,” he said. “I think it’s important to find friendships with people of all ages and types, so you can understand the world in contexts other than your own. That’s why reading is so important. That’s why writing is so important.”
When we arrived in the Sky Parlor, James shook his head. “I just wish we could pull the shades up! How wonderful it would be, to look at the things as Hawthorne did!”
It did seem ridiculous, this order to keep the shades down, an order given by the same people who refused to repaint the house. No wonder the place was so dreary. No wonder visitors were unimpressed: we were blocking out the light and the view! It wasn’t fair to the house, or to history, or to James, or to me. The darkness made the house seem unreal, a caricature of what it once was. Why had the Orchard been given more grant money than the Wayside? The Orchard’s shades stayed up and sunlight poured through special protective windows. It was as if the Wayside had literally been put by the wayside because it wasn’t special or interesting enough, the loser of some literary popularity contest that I had cast a vote in by wishing I was working at the Orchard.
I realized I admired James. He managed himself the way he tried to manage the Wayside: clean the gutters, paint the siding, and step by step it might all one day be as good as he dreamed.
“Do
you ever lift the shades?” I asked. “Have you ever? I would love to see them lifted.”
He paused for a moment. “I have,” he said. I looked around the room, imagining it swallowed by light. “Just briefly, just quickly. I wouldn’t want to ruin anything. I think it’s important for the house to feel, sometimes, the way it once was.”
I walked over to the velvet rope, swinging it back and forth. “What about his desk?” I asked.
“Don’t tell,” James said. “But I stood there. I touched it. I felt like a writer. People can be connected like that, through things and places. I wish everyone could see this room that way, could have that feeling.” But he did not invite me to see it that way, perhaps because I had no aspirations of becoming a writer.
Now when I saw Ted he nodded his head at me like teachers used to do when they passed you in the hallway and couldn’t remember your name. I flashed him a quick, awkward smile and looked back down at the register, my face burning.
Later, James asked, “How are you getting along with the folks here at work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Julie hasn’t been coming around. You don’t seem to talk to Ted anymore.”
I shrugged, but I was surprised he’d noticed. I’d barely talked to Ted at work in the first place.
“Ted’s a lot older than you,” James said.
“We were hardly ever even friends,” I said.
“And Julie?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. The rest of the truth was that work was starting to feel lonely. I gave tours and tried to think of my goals, but I didn’t have any. I punched the keys on the register one at a time like a typist who doesn’t know where any of the keys are, and I abandoned my barrettes and headbands, letting my hair do whatever it wanted. I surrendered, finally, to Antigone, wanting to give it a chance like I’d never really given Hawthorne. If Audrey was Hester Prynne, maybe I was Antigone, my brother away at a war nobody in Boston believed in, and he was fighting it for me and he was fighting it for them and he was fighting it most of all for himself, and it didn’t matter what I believed in besides my brother, besides believing that he believed in what he was fighting for, and I thought, sure, I would sacrifice myself for him if it came to that.
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