Long Island Noir (20 page)
They stayed too long.
For nonsense, for nothing,
she thought.
She listened to the Sound, its song of companionship, its song of passion, its song of outlawed offenders.
Haste on.
S
he walks from the station and comes up the driveway in the heat of the July afternoon, her leather backpack on her back, her heavy handbag and a carryall in her hands. Her daughter Emma’s car glints silver in the glare in the pebbled driveway, and she can hear the gleeful cries of children accompanied by the sounds of splashing. They must already be in the pool.
She feels a stab of pain down her left leg and wonders if she will be able to take care of two children for two weeks on her own. She has turned sixty this summer. She stands for a moment in the shade to get her breath and looks up at her house, a gray, barn-shaped edifice with blue hydrangeas growing in round tubs, as they did in her own childhood house in Johannesburg, on either side of the blue door. There are rosebushes and day lilies growing wild along the white fence, and very faintly she can hear the soothing sound of the ocean. The property, which they bought many years ago, when such places were cheap, is on a secluded and tree-shaded back lane.
She looks up and sees her daughter who waves from the window over the staircase. Each time she sees her only child it is with a little shock of surprise. She still sees the beloved baby, the plump, pink-cheeked pet, with the spun-gold hair, whom she called an angel. Now at forty, Emma is no longer plump or pink-cheeked but slender, as though life has worn away at her like some friable substance. Even from this distance her mother sees her pale skin and the dark shadows under her eyes, as Emma waves to her through the window on the staircase in her blue jeans and washed-out shirt.
Stella smiles and waves back as she listens to the yells. It is the boy, Mark, she gathers, who is making all the noise in the swimming pool, for the girl, Rose, now appears in the open doorway, standing with one hand on her hip and the other lifted to wave in the bright afternoon sunlight, swaying like a vivid bloom between the blue hydrangea bushes. How can this tall, full-breasted redhead with her green eyes be her grandchild? She looks nothing like her grandmother, her mother—both small-breasted, pale-haired, and pale-eyed.
“Goodness, how big you have got,” Stella cannot stop herself from saying, as she walks into the shadowy hall, though she remembers just how annoying such a clichéd comment sounded as a child.
But Rose, with her long dangling earrings of somewhat doubtful taste, who appears almost eighteen this year, rather than thirteen, doesn’t seem to mind. Damp as she is, she embraces her grandmother warmly. Stella stands back to admire her. Rose’s sloe eyes are circled with makeup and her full breasts burst from her tight pink bikini top which is decorated with silver spangles. If her daughter has become increasingly slender over the years, her granddaughter has become increasingly buxom and doesn’t seem to mind flaunting her charms. Stella in her faded blue jeans, her white shirt, and linen navy jacket feels a little colorless, dowdy, and inconsequential at her side.
She finds Emma in the large, old-fashioned kitchen with its low-beamed ceiling and the glass-fronted cupboards where Stella’s mother’s fine china, cut glass, and silver—what is left of it—are displayed.
“So many of the cups have been broken, I’m afraid,” Stella says as her daughter helps her make the tea and puts out the pink shell-shaped cups on the wooden table. “I haven’t bothered to replace them. What with the taxes on this place which do nothing but rise.”
They live on her professor’s salary and not much else, these days. Stella’s husband, always a thrifty man, is saving to retire in the next few years from his position as a doctor with the state; then they plan on giving up the place in town and moving out here permanently. Also, they try to help their daughter who has recently divorced a husband who works in the theater. Emma lives alone, the sole supporter of her two children. “Two children are easier than three,” she told Stella at the time of the divorce. Stella said nothing but thought that none at all might have been easiest.
Now she takes out the silver teapot and puts the scones she has brought from the city on a platter. The two women sit opposite one another and her daughter tells her she has been up since five, driving out from Montclair early this morning to bring the boy and the girl to the house at the sea. She looks exhausted, her head in her hands, dark circles like ash under the pale eyes.
Her daughter is leaving the next day for Texas to present a paper at a conference. She too teaches history—but at a state college in Montclair. She is leaving the children in Stella’s care for two weeks, not something she has ever done before.
But this year, Rose, at thirteen, has become a teenager, and the boy is now almost ten, old enough to fend for themselves, surely. “Low maintenance,” her daughter has said over the phone. Stella’s husband has laughingly put all her fears into words. “Let’s hope you don’t send Rose back pregnant, with AIDS, and drug addicted!”
Now, her hand shaking slightly, Stella puts down her mother’s pale pink, almost transparent cup. She asks her daughter, “Do you think they can go to the beach on their own?”
“I think you could let Rose go alone, for a few hours, perhaps, if she wants to. She’s a great swimmer and quite sensible.”
“And what happens if she meets boys there?”
“Well, you’ll have to check them out, to make sure there is parental supervision of some sort, if she goes out with them. But don’t worry, Mummy, she’s very savvy and not likely to disappear with some stranger. She shouldn’t be any trouble at all, but you can’t really ask her to watch Mark on the beach.”
“No, I suppose not. But they are both good swimmers, no?” Stella says, and rises to watch through the window as Mark, a plump nine-year-old, runs and jumps into the pool. He is her favorite, a bright child who beats her at chess, blondheaded and blue-eyed like his Irish father.
“You’ll have to keep an eye on him. You know what boys are like. He’s totally unaware of danger,” the daughter says, and her pale eyes fill with tears.
“You were such a careful child, such an angel,” Stella says, grasping her daughter’s hand. “They’ll be fine, don’t worry,” she adds, and wonders why she didn’t warn her own child more of the dangers in life, the importance when choosing a mate to remember that you choose not just a husband, who might be dispensible, but also the father of your children, who is not.
“The good thing is that they sleep so late,” the daughter says as she washes the cups.
“Yes, I remember sleeping like that. Now I wake so early. I’ll have a couple of hours in the mornings for my work.” Stella is working on a book about the role of women’s memoirs in eighteenth-century France. She has a whole load of them in her heavy backpack: the memoirs of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, the Marquise de Boigne, and Madame Roland. The problem for her will be how to get through the rest of the day, she thinks.
“I don’t know how you do so many things at once. I can only concentrate on one thing at a time,” the daughter says, looking out the window at the children in the pool. Then she asks her mother how her teaching has been going this spring.
“I like the faculty so much. I made friends with a lovely young Ethiopian woman, Eleni, who is teaching with us now. She must be a little older than you. She came for dinner with her boy who is a bit younger than Mark—adorable. We sat up and drank wine and talked until too late, and the child fell asleep in my lap. Apparently the father, a famous poet, is not particularly interested in him, or her for that matter.” Stella offers her daughter another scone. She is always trying to get her to eat.
The daughter refuses the offer and says, “What’s the professor’s name?”
Stella thinks for a moment and then shakes her head. “Dr. Alzheimer whispering in my ear. I can’t remember her surname. One of those complicated, unpronounceable African names. She wrote me a warm thank-you letter, saying how much the dinner had meant to her, which I must answer. She too is on her own with her little boy.”
Stella looks up at her grandson, who stands dripping wet in the kitchen doorway. His blond hair is cut short and sticks up on his head, which gives him a slightly surprised look.
“Dry your feet, darling, will you, before you come inside— because of the floors.” She adds, “Try not to take out ten million towels, could you, darling?” A friend has told her to install the one-towel rule in order to get through these two summer weeks alone with her grandchildren.
At dinner that night, they sit around the wide eighteenthcentury dining table on Chippendale chairs and eat the beef and potatoes Stella has roasted. The conversation centers on one of Rose’s classmates, who has, it is rumored, fallen pregnant.
“At thirteen!” Stella gasps.
“I think she’s fourteen. These things happen,” Emma says, glancing at her mother, who had, after all, married her father for just such a reason, though they were both nineteen at the time.
The first few days without her daughter are unexpectedly easy. Mark strolls into her room well after ten o’clock, when she has been working for three hours in her large bedroom, which opens onto the garden. She likes to sit at her desk, glancing up from time to time at the pots around the pool with the bright petunias, nasturtiums, and verbena. She keeps the door open and listens to the sounds of the birds calling and the water running in the pool.
Mark always looks smart, his hair carefully wetted and brushed back and his clothes, for this visit, obviously chosen with a care which touches her. After breakfast, she goes swimming with him in the pool, doing laps, trying to teach him how to put his face in the water, how to improve his stroke.
The boy leads the way into the village, riding her husband’s bicycle, which is much too big for him, pedaling vigorously along the edge of the busy road. Stella follows shakily behind. Though she has several degrees, she has never learned to ride a bicycle properly: she has difficulty managing a turn. Fortunately, the road to the beach and the one into the village, though heavily traveled, are mostly straight, and Mark carries the towels and even the big umbrella across the handlebars for her.
After lunch, Rose appears, looking fresh and rosy, like her name, to eat the croissants which Stella has bought for breakfast at the farmer’s market. When Rose has put on her makeup and fixed her hair in some complicated way, piling it up high or wearing it hanging down loose and glossy with little silver butterflies caught in the web, she bicycles down to the beach for a few hours.
Stella makes simple suppers—spaghetti, pork chops—or orders in pizza. She watches the news on her own, with a glass of white wine, and lets the children watch television and put themselves to bed. She climbs into bed early and sleeps heavily.
As the weather is fine, they eat outside under a white umbrella by the pool. Rose eats little and then rises quickly from the table before Stella has hardly begun, taking her plate with her politely, thanking her for the meal, which she has only picked at daintily. She says very little to her or to anyone else and spends most of her time in her bedroom, applying makeup, which she has brought in large quantities.
If she needs anything, she sends Mark to ask Stella for it. He seems willing to do anything for his big sister. From time to time Stella knocks on the girl’s door and peers in, catching a glimpse of her on the unmade bed, plucking stray hairs from her legs with the tweezers, the television lit and some youth singing something without melody or comprehensible words. Sometimes Stella finds her eating bags of chips and drinking Gatorade, which she has apparently bought at the farmer’s market across the street.
If anything, Stella feels a little lonely. Her husband had promised to join her on the weekend but is held up in town at his work.
“They are being terribly good. No problems,” she tells her daughter, when she calls each day to speak to the children.
Mark sometimes lingers on with his grandmother at the table, particularly after breakfast, which they eat on their own, Rose still lying in bed. He takes the sports section from her newspaper and sits beside her, solemnly reading every word and commenting on the trading of various players and how much money they have been offered to change teams. He wants to be a basketball player when he grows up. “They make millions,” he says hopefully and grins at her.
“Such a short career,” she responds.
“They can coach and do other things afterward,” he explains, and plays with the gold bracelets on her arm.
“I miss my mom,” he confides on the third day and puts his head on his hand. He says he has a stomachache.
“I miss her too,” Stella says, ignoring the bit about the stomach. She looks at the boy, who does seem pale, the large blue eyes scintillant with tears. She ruffles his short hair and adds, “Tomorrow, let’s get up early and go for a run and a swim on the beach—just you and me.”
She remembers her mother-in-law saying to her once, when she complained about how much work even one child was, “Each moment with a child is the last.”
She wakes early the next day and goes into Mark’s room. Rose is still fast asleep in the big upstairs bedroom on the canopy bed. When she puts her hand on the boy’s forehead, he springs up immediately.
The trees arch above them, as they run side by side down the lane, and the clear, early-morning light flickers through leaves on the boy’s bright face. He is one of those people, she thinks, cursed like her with a guilty conscience and destined always to try too hard to please. She laughs at him, then dashes playfully ahead, turns, and runs backward.
“Next year you will be the one to beat me, I bet,” she says. Panting, the boy smiles.
All her anxiety lifts. She feels so young and strong. How could she be sixty? It seems impossible. She doesn’t see other sixty-year-old women running. She feels younger than ever, this cool bright morning. The pain in her leg has gone. She remembers so clearly being thirteen like Rose with pimples and crushes on boys. Amagansett. The loveliest place on earth in the summer, and I love these children; I am a lucky woman, she thinks.