“Butterscotch?” He holds out a piece of amber candy.
“Uh . . . sure.”
He unwraps it before handing it to me. “Sweets to the sweet.”
“Thanks,” I say, blushing.
He gestures for me to lead the way. “Lovely property,” he says as we stroll toward the henhouse. “Used to be a lodging house, Ramona said?”
The butterscotch is melting in my mouth. I turn it over with my tongue. “My grandparents took in summer guests. They called it Umbrella Roof Inn.”
He squints at the roof. “Umbrella?”
“You’re right,” I say, laughing a little. “It looks nothing like an umbrella.”
“I suppose it keeps the rain out.”
“Aren’t all roofs supposed to do that?”
Now he’s laughing too. “Well, you find out the answer and let me know.”
Walton is right; my brother’s scratchy jacket is too hot. After I’ve gathered the eggs, I peel off the jacket and Walton suggests we sit in the grass.
“So what’s your favorite color?” he asks.
“Really?”
“Why not?” The butterscotch clicks between his teeth.
“Okay.” I’ve never been asked this question. I have to think about it. The color of a piglet’s ear, a summer sky at dusk, Al’s beloved roses . . . “Um. Pink.”
“Favorite animal.”
“My spaniel, Topsy.”
“Favorite food.”
“I’m famous for my fried apple cake.”
“Will you make it for me?”
I nod.
“I’m going to hold you to that. Favorite poet.”
This is an easy one. “Emily Dickinson.”
“Ah,” he says. “‘Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.’”
“‘Or has it feathers like a bird—’”
“Very good!” he says, clearly surprised that I know it. “‘Or billows like a shore.’”
“My teacher gave me a collection of her poems when I left school. That’s one of my favorites.”
He shakes his head. “I never understood that last part.”
“Well . . .” I’m a little hesitant to offer an interpretation. What if he disagrees? “I think . . . I think it means that you should stay open to possibility. However it comes your way.”
He nods. “Ah. That makes sense. So are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Open to possibility?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. What about you?”
“Trying. It’s a struggle.”
He tells me that he is going to Harvard to please his father, though he might’ve preferred the smaller campus of Bowdoin. “But you don’t turn down Harvard, do you?”
“Why not?”
“Why not, indeed,” he says.
“HE LIKES YOU,” Ramona says, eyes sparkling. “He asks me all these questions: how long I’ve known you, if you have a boyfriend, if your father is very strict. He wants to know what you think.”
“What I think?”
“About him, silly. What you think about him.”
It feels like a trick question, as if I’m being asked to respond in a language I don’t understand. “I like him. I like many people,” I say warily.
Ramona wrinkles her nose. “You do not. You hardly like anyone.”
“I hardly know anyone.”
“True,” she says. “But don’t be coy. Does your heart pitter-patter when you think of him?”
“Ramona, honestly.”
“Don’t act so scandalized. Just answer the question.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
“Maybe a little. That’s a yes.”
As the summer progresses she goes back and forth between Walton and me like a carrier pigeon, carrying scraps of news, impressions, gossip. She is perfectly suited to the task—one of those girls with boundless energy and intelligence and no place to exercise them, like a terrier with a housebound owner.
AT FIRST MOTHER is formal and a little cool with Walton, but slowly he wins her over. I watch how he calibrates his behavior, deferring to her at every turn, calling her Ma’am, presuming nothing. He coaxes her outside for picnics and afternoon sails. “Well, the boy does have excellent manners,” she allows at the end of a long afternoon lunch on the shore. “Must’ve learned them at an expensive school.”
One morning Mother surprises me by returning from town with a bolt of calico cloth, a packet of buttons, and a new Butterick pattern. She hands it to me casually, saying, “I thought you could use a new style.” I look at the illustration on the cover: a dress with a seven-panel skirt and fitted bodice with small mother-of-pearl buttons. The calico is pretty, flowers with green leaves on a brown-sugar background. I set to work after my chores are done, cutting out each piece of the pattern, pinning the puzzle pieces of delicate tissue to the fabric, marking it with a nub of chalk, trimming along the solid line. I work in the orange light of an oil lamp and several candles as the sun drops from the sky.
Late into the night I sit hunched over Mother’s Singer, feeding the fabric through, my foot pumping the treadle. Mother pauses in the doorway on her way to bed. She comes and stands behind me, then reaches down and traces the hem with her finger, smoothing it flat behind the needle.
When I put on the dress the next morning, it skims closely over my hips. In the pantry I hold the small cloudy mirror in my hand, turning it this way and that to get the full effect, but all I can see are bits and pieces.
“That turned out,” is all Mother says when she comes into the kitchen to help with the noonday meal. But I can tell she’s pleased.
Later in the morning Walton comes to the door with a bouquet of tulips and daffodils. He takes off his straw boater and bows slightly to Mother, who is sifting flour at the table. “Good day, Mrs. Olson.”
She nods. “Good day, Walton.”
He hands me the bouquet. “What a dress!”
“Mother bought me the fabric and the pattern.” I hold out the skirt and turn so he can see all the panels.
“Lovely taste, Mrs. Olson. It’s beautiful. But wait, Christina—you made this?”
“Yes, last night.”
He grasps a piece of fabric from the full skirt and rubs it between his fingers, touches a mother-of-pearl button on my sleeve. “I am awed by you.”
Behind me, Mother says, “Christina can do just about anything she sets her mind to.” This rare praise surprises me—she’s usually so restrained. But then I remember that my mother was discovered in this house by a stranger at the door. She knows it’s possible.
ONE DAY WHEN Walton is visiting I tell him about the Mystery Tunnel—how I think of it as a mysterious and magic place, holding secrets that may never be revealed. “Some think it’s filled with buried treasure,” I say.
“Show me,” he says.
I know my parents won’t approve of our going alone, so we make a secret plan: we’ll wait until Mother is resting, Papa is at the fishing weir with the boys, and no one will suspect I’m not where I usually am on a Wednesday morning, wringing clothes behind the house and hanging them on the line. He’ll come quietly, on foot; and if anyone is nearby, we won’t attempt it.
At breakfast, before heading off to the weir, my brothers help me fill the tubs with water. If anyone cared to notice, they might have seen that my dress is starched, my hair neatly braided with a ribbon, my cheeks pink not from exertion but from being pinched between my fingers, as Ramona taught me to do.
Finding me in the yard behind the house after everyone has left, Walton silently takes the heavy, wet clothes from my hands. He begins to feed them through the wringer, turning the crank with one hand and coaxing them along with the other. At the clothesline he lifts the damp pieces from the basket, shakes out the wrinkles, and hands them to me one by one as I pin them on the line. When the basket is empty, he lifts the rope and secures it to the poles.
How thrilling it is—I am suddenly aware�
�to be playing house.
Hidden among the damp and flapping clothes, Walton reaches for me, pulling me gently toward him. His eyes on mine, he lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses it, then tugs me closer, tilts his head, and kisses me on the mouth. His lips are cool and smooth; I feel his heart pulsing through his shirt. He smells of butterscotch, of spice. It’s such a strange and heady experience that I can barely breathe.
When I take the basket back inside the house, I slip out of my apron and smooth my hair, stealing a glimpse of myself in the fragment of mirror in the pantry. What I see looking back at me is a thin-faced girl with a too-large nose and lively if uneven gray eyes. Her features may be plain, but her skin is clear and her eyes are bright. I think of the man waiting for me outside. His hair, I’ve noticed, has begun to recede. His chest is lightly concave, like a teaspoon, his spine unnaturally stiff from that summer in a cast. When he’s agitated he has a slight lisp. It isn’t inconceivable to imagine—is it?—that this imperfect man could grow to love me.
We walk silently, single file, in the shadow of the house and barn to the trees beyond the field. At this time of day, with the shadows as they are, we cannot be seen unless someone is actually looking for us. Walton reaches forward and brushes my fingertips, clasps my hand. Several times, making our way down a steep embankment, through a dense cluster of trees, we drop hands, but he finds my fingertips again like a knitter seeking a dropped stitch. When we are out in the open but hidden by the ridge, I pull on his hand playfully and he pulls back, bringing me to a stumbling stop. He is behind me, his breath on my neck, his arm at his side, holding me against him.
“Heaven could not be better than this,” he murmurs.
I don’t know whether he’s talking about the pelt of water stretching out in front of us, the dancing grasses, the rocks with their mantle of inky seaweed—or me. It doesn’t matter. This place, this point, is as much a part of me as my hair and nose and eyes.
We are close to the lip of the tunnel. His hands on my waist, Walton turns me around, his forehead against mine.
“I’ve already discovered the treasure,” he says. “All this time you were here, waiting to be found.”
WALTON’S ATTENTION IS like a sun high in the sky, so bright, so blinding, that everything else fades in contrast. The voices of my parents, my brothers, the clucking chickens and barking dog, rain on the roof like rice in a can—these noises simmer like a stew in the back of my brain. I am barely aware of them until my mother or a brother shakes my arm and says sharply, “Did you hear what I said?”
Do other people walk around in this state? Did my parents? What a strange idea—that perfectly ordinary people with mundane lives might have once experienced this quickening, this vertiginous unfolding. Their eyes betray no evidence of it.
Mamey used to tell stories about natives on the islands she visited who’d never seen snow and had no language for it. That’s how I feel. I have no language, no context, for this.
My friend Sadie says, “You’re a goner. You’ll move to Boston and we’ll never see you again.”
“Maybe I’ll convince him to live here.”
“And do what? He doesn’t seem like the farming type.”
“He wants to be a journalist, he says. He can write anywhere.”
“What’s he going to write about? The price of milk?”
But what does Sadie know? Walton seems smitten with our way of life. “This is so different from how I grew up,” he says. “Your knowledge is real. It’s practical. Mine is all in my head. I don’t know how to foal a calf or skim cream from milk. I’m hopeless at sailing or harnessing a horse to a buggy. Is there nothing you can’t do?”
“You’re the one who can do, and be, anything you choose,” I remind him.
“What I choose,” he says, “is to be with you.”
It feels as if my life is moving forward at two separate speeds, one at the usual pace, with its predictable rhythms and familiar inhabitants, and the other rushing ahead, a blur of color and sound and sensation. It’s clear to me now that for twenty years I have gone through the motions of each day like a dumb animal, neither daring to hope for a different kind of life nor even knowing enough to desire one.
I am determined to keep up with Walton. I ask my brothers to bring the newspapers from town when they go for supplies. I want to learn enough to discuss politics and current events—the flood in Dayton, Ohio, and Irish Home Rule; the federal income tax and the suffragettes demonstrating in Washington; Woodrow Wilson’s views on segregation and the assassination of King George of Greece. At the library in Cushing I check out novels by authors Walton has mentioned, Willa Cather and D. H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton, all of which I read through a filter, thinking of him: “She was afraid lest this boy, who, nevertheless, looked something like a Walter Scott hero,” Lawrence writes in Sons and Lovers, “who could paint and speak French, and knew what algebra meant, and who went by train to Nottingham every day, might consider her simply as the swine-girl, unable to perceive the princess beneath.”
I’m afraid that I am the swine girl. But he treats me like a princess. Papa agrees to let me take Blackie and the buggy one afternoon, and I take Walton on a long tour from Broad Cove, with its views of the outer islands, to the quaint shops in East Friendship, to the pristine Ulmer Church in downtown Rockland. We end up in the grass on the hill overlooking Kissing Cove, eating egg salad sandwiches and home-canned pickles, drinking lemonade from a mason jar. As afternoon fades to evening we watch the sun melt into the liquid horizon, a thin disc of moon emerging faintly above. “The stars are so close,” he says, pointing up to the black expanse. “Like you could reach up and take one. Hold it in your hand.” He pretends to grab one and hand it to me. “When I am in Cambridge and you’re here in Cushing, I’ll look up at the stars and think of you. Then you won’t seem so far away.”
THE FINAL WEEK of August is sodden, cloud heavy, with an unwelcome chill that announces the end of summer as abruptly as a dinner host standing at the table to signal the end of the party.
When Walton comes to say good-bye, I am so choked up I can barely speak. I had not realized how dependent I’ve become on seeing him. “I promise to write,” he says, and I promise, too, but he doesn’t yet have an address at Harvard, so I will have to wait for him to write first.
Waiting to hear from him is agony. I plod to the post office once a day at noon.
“I’m taking the buggy into town at three o’clock, as always,” Al says. “I can pick up the mail.”
“I like the fresh air,” I tell him.
The postmistress, thin, fussy, meticulous Bertha Dorset, eyes me with curiosity. I soon learn her routines: she keeps stamps in rolls in a tidy drawer and dusts the coin wrappers with a goose feather. Twice a day, according to a checklist on the wall behind her head, she sweeps the floor. At sunset every evening she lowers the flag outside the post office, takes it off the pole, and folds it neatly into a box.
When I arrive, she hands over the mail in our box, bills and circulars, mostly. “That’s it for today,” she always says.
I nod and try my best to smile.
I feel like I’m living in a jail cell, waiting for release, the strain of listening for the man with the keys making me tense and jittery. After supper one night, as I’m clearing the dishes, my brothers are debating whether to take up the fish weir; it will be destroyed by ice storms if they wait too long, but on the other hand the sardine catch is good so it would be a shame to dismantle it too soon, and I think I might jump out of my skin. I snap at the boys, surprising myself at my own meanness: “For crying out loud, you clodhoppers, pick up your plates! Were you born in a barn?”
There’s thin satisfaction in their wounded surprise.
And then one day, long after I’ve stopped believing there will be a letter, Bertha slides a pile of mail onto the counter, and here it is: a thick white envelope with a red two-cent George Washington stamp, addressed to me. Christina Olson.
“
Well, look at that. Hope it’s good news,” she says.
I can barely wait until I’m out of the post office to open the envelope. I settle on a fallen tree just off the road and unfold the thick paper.
“Dearest Christina . . .”
I read hungrily, skipping forward, shuffling pages (two, three, four) to the end—“Yours”—mine!—“Walton.” My gaze catches on phrases: “summer I will never forget,” “the way you shield your eyes from the sun with your hand, the flat collar of your sailor blouse, the blue-black ribbon in your hair,” and finally: “All roads lead back to Cushing for me.”
I skip forward and back like a bee trying to escape from a hole in a screen. He can’t stop thinking about the summer in Maine. The week he was in Malden was tedious and hot; Harvard is lonely after the sailing and picnics and endless adventures. He misses it all: the sloop moored in Kissing Cove, egg sandwiches on just-baked bread, Ramona’s silly jokes, clambakes down by Little Island, pink-orange sunsets. But mostly, he writes, he misses me.
The light is different on the walk home, softer, warm on my face. I tilt my chin up and close my eyes, putting one foot after the other in the left-hand rut of the road. I can only walk like this, with my eyes closed, because I know the way by heart.
EVERY WEEK OR ten days a thick letter in a white envelope with a two-cent stamp arrives in the mail. He writes from the library, from the dining hall, from the narrow wooden desk in his dormitory room, by the light of a gas lamp after his rugby-playing, gin-guzzling roommate has gone to sleep. Each envelope, a package of words to feed my word-hungry soul, provides a portal into a world where students linger in wood-paneled classrooms to talk to professors, where entire days can be spent in a library, where what you write and how you write it are all you need to worry about. I imagine myself in his place: strolling across campus, peering up at thick-paned, glowing windows at dusk, going to expensive dinners with friends in Harvard Square, where the waiters wear tuxedos and look down their noses at the unkempt students, and the students don’t care.
A Piece of the World Page 9