Bittersweet (12 page)

Catching herself, Lu looked up at me sharply, worry furrowing
her brow. I recognized in that look a child in possession of an inconveniently attuned mind, one she had learned to camouflage. I nodded once, and then she truly smiled, before going on, her knowledge of the natural world spilling forth as though, with that one nod, I’d given her a gift.

“Let’s see … white-tailed deer? Sometimes you’ll see a red-tailed fox for, like, a second, running across the meadow. And there are black bears—well, supposedly. I’ve never seen one. Quail families. Pheasant families in the forest. Quail are much more skittish, but if you can catch a glimpse of them, their babies are these tiny, adorable puffballs with little racing feet. And keep your eyes out for the pileated woodpecker.”

“What does it look like?”

“A dinosaur.”

I laughed. “No, really.”

She nodded knowingly. “You’ll know it when you see it.” We both checked in on the turtle head, bobbing in the water. “Daddy says there are catamounts—you can tell because you’ll find a deer kill sometimes off the Winloch road.”

“What’s a catamount?”

“An eastern cougar.” She shook her head to reassure me. “But I’ve never seen one of those either.” We sat in silence, looking out at the small tufts the breeze was making on the quiet lake. “You really love it here,” she observed, unwrapping her lollipop and sticking it in her cheek.

My eyes skimmed the dazzling water as I thought of all the vibrant life above and below. I wanted to tell her how lucky she was to call this hers. Instead I said, “It’s heaven.”

L
uvinia Winslow was the first person I met at Winloch who I would have easily befriended elsewhere. She wasn’t as cool as Ev, but whether that was character or lingering childhood was hard to tell. She was smart, and not afraid to boast about it—top of her class in math (“that’s both boys and girls” she was quick to point out)—but also innocent in a manner not shared by any boarding school girl I’d ever met. And she was innately generous; in the first twenty-four hours I knew her, Lu picked wildflowers from the meadow for Bittersweet’s kitchen table, mixed me a batch of sourdough starter, and taught me how to do the Australian crawl. From the few interactions I witnessed between them, I caught on that Ev treated Lu much the way she treated me—adoring one minute, blind the next—but instead of feeling jealousy, I found myself glad to live in the category of little sisters.

“Have you been swimming off Flat Rocks yet?” Lu asked as we sat together below Bittersweet, where we’d met each morning for the three days I’d known her. It felt like we’d been friends much longer than that.

“No.” Flat Rocks was the prized swimming area below the Trillium meadow, where the Winslows frolicked and splashed together—it
was centrally located, a flat, smooth expanse of sandstone big enough for two dozen people, which allowed a sweeping view of Mt. Mansfield, the Adirondacks, and Winslow Bay. Although the spot had been mentioned to me by nearly every Winslow I encountered—from the teenage boys headed there to practice diving off the swimming dock to Emily and Annie and other young mothers herding their small children, water wings, sunhats, and many bottles of sunscreen up and over the hill—I had never been invited. It would have been easy to grab my towel and descend the Trillium steps to the broad plateau myself, but I had a clear sense that each Winslow would have stared up at me just a little too long, and even the thought of their collective watchfulness made me blush.

Lu insisted we go that instant. We found Ev still in bed. She scowled at my waking her, at my invitation, at the obvious closeness that had already grown between Lu and me. “I’ve never been to Flat Rocks,” I said, tickling at her toes, “and you’ve been god knows where all week. You owe me an afternoon.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Ev sniped.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I had resolved to ask nothing specific about her love triangle, and I knew she wouldn’t volunteer anything in front of Lu.

She only sighed.

“Come on then,” I insisted as I gathered up
Paradise Lost
from our bedside table, brushing aside the irritation at her recent lack of interest in me. She should have been the one inviting me to Flat Rocks. Eventually she followed us out of the house, slumping in self-pity until Lu and I threatened to throw her in the lake, which brought an ever-so-slight smile to her face, turning her, briefly, back into her best self.

We descended the wooden stairs below the Trillium lawn just as the sun passed its midway point. We were laden with goods, including
turkey sandwiches Masha the cook had slapped together on a moment’s notice. One way in which Lu and I were not alike: while it never would have occurred to me to ask someone else to make my lunch, Lu had assumed it was our only option.

A few folks had scattered themselves across the rocks, but we were early enough that the teenagers and childless had yet to arrive, and late enough that those with small children had already come and gone, for noon lunches and nap time. We had ample room to spread our towels. I applied my sunblock in globs, then watched Lu skillfully rub a thin layer of the lotion into her golden skin. At the sight of my blotchy face she giggled, and her slender fingers evened me out. Ev rolled her eyes at us and settled into another nap on the warm rocks.

I donned my sunglasses and flipped open
Paradise Lost
, retucking the letters I’d penned to my mother, but hadn’t sent, into the back of the book. Lu frowned at my reading choice as she flipped open her
People
. “You’re going to fall asleep,” she singsonged.

My official story—as if anyone was asking—was that I was on Book Three. But Lu knew me better than I imagined, because the truth was, I hadn’t been able to read more than a page at a time before dozing off. Consequently, even though I’d devoted many cumulative hours to the cause, I didn’t have any idea what was happening in the damn book (1) because it was smarter than I was, and (2) because I had no memory of what I’d read the day before.

I flipped, with dread, to the page I’d earmarked and began:

An
Us Weekly
tumbled over the top of the book, landing on my face. “Thank me later,” Lu deadpanned.

I’d never been much of a beachgoer, and it took me a couple hours to understand that our business for the day would cover—and not exceed—swimming, reading, gossiping, and lolling in the sun. I kept wanting to stand up and do something, kept thinking of the Winslow papers waiting for me in the Dining Hall attic, but every time I stirred, Lu placed her hand upon my arm and insisted I enjoy myself. “If you want, we can take a dinghy out,” she said, disdainfully adding, “but that’s mostly for the boys.”

After we ate our sandwiches, Ev declared herself parched, gathered up her things, and headed back up to Bittersweet. I guessed I was supposed to follow her—it was certainly what I would have done only a week before—but Lu shot me a look that told me to grow a backbone. So I stayed.

The boys arrived. Arlo and Jeffrey and a few of the younger teens made a beeline for the water, splashing as they submerged themselves, butterflying to the swimming dock twenty yards out. I watched Owen set his things down carefully where the other boys had tossed their towels, then glance over his shoulder at us. It was a surreptitious look, meant to appear nonchalant, as though he were scanning the whole rocks, but I saw he was searching out an oblivious Lu, absorbed in her magazine.

“How’s he related?” I asked as I watch him wade into the water.

“Who?”

“Owen.”

“He’s not,” Lu said without lifting her eyes from the page. “He’s Arlo’s best friend from school.”

So he was fair game. “He seems nice.”

“Sure.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Once or twice.”

“Lu,” I said sharply, “I think he likes you.”

That got her attention. She drew herself into a sitting position. Watched him swim carefully to the dock, where Arlo and Jeffrey jumped and called his name. “He’s seventeen,” she whispered, awestruck.

“And cute.” He was the kind of boy I would have loved in high school—well-mannered, tawny, and lean. The kind of boy who wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He was good-looking in counterpoint to the purebred Winslows; his ancestors, like mine, had probably been workingmen.

Lu lifted her magazine again. But I could tell, from the glow in her cheeks, that she didn’t mind the thought of Owen liking her.

My memory of the many afternoons I spent at Flat Rocks that summer is long and lingering, bound up with the reassuring sense of things always having been the way they were, and the belief that they would always be that way. As the afternoon wore on, more Winslows descended the steps, calling happily to one another, and I began to see the nonfamilial, simply familiar, connections between them, and understand that to sit upon the rocks and watch the world go by was essential to the definition of being a Winslow.

They liked to ride in boats: wooden canoes, rowboats, skiffs, dinghies, kayaks. Once the children were awake again, someone—an uncle, a cousin—would take a few little ones out on the Sunfish to teach them to sail. Birch owned a Chris-Craft, a wooden motorboat from the thirties, with teak decks. Every winter, the whole boat had to be stripped and revarnished, the chrome polished so that it gleamed anew. Come midafternoon, he’d take the teenagers out with a pair of water skis, and they’d zoom by us in great circles, taking turns whizzing atop the water.

The Winslows liked to discuss boats almost as much as they liked
to ride in them: how loud the Boston Whalers were, how terribly accosting the buzz of the Jet Skis, the awful sound of new-moneyed Canadian French coming off the too-close yachts. To a person, the clan admired the beautiful line of a Friendship sloop, and the primary colors of the spinnakers as they came off the marina, speeding past Flat Rocks for the Thursday night races.

Then there was the constant hubbub about the dogs: who had rolled in deer scat, who had disobeyed on the walk, who was a good girl, who could be trusted with the children, who should be taken back up to the cottage. All of Flat Rocks—all of Winloch, for that matter—became permeated, as the summer went on, with the rancid tang of canines living in a constant state of dampness—a smell I never could have imagined I could tolerate, and came to love.

And finally, there were the angels, the dozen or so Winslow cherubim: pouring, toe-dipping, squatting at the edge of the water. The youngest were naked, the oldest in bathing suits, the five- and six-year-olds in water wings or life preservers so their mothers could chat one another up, scraping their aluminum chairs along the rocks as they found an even spot to sit. The offspring wore hats atop their sunblock-drenched bodies, and were periodically wrapped in damp towels that invariably ended up dragging, dirty and brown, upon the ground. Watching Lu’s delight as she joined the little ones at the water’s edge, I realized how recently she had been one of them. She was only a head taller than the eldest child, but something definitive had happened to separate her from them. And yet, it was not hard to imagine what she had looked like at the lip of the lake only a few years before.

As the afternoon settled into night, the watchful mothers called their angels home, and the rocks took on a cocktail tone, smelling of bourbon, Sauvignon Blanc, and Camembert, permeated with a momentary, smudged happiness that would descend, inevitably and
all too soon, into the insistent nighttime rituals of dinner, bathing, and sleep.

When the light began to fade, Lu and I gathered up our things and marched back to the Dining Hall, where Indo and her dogs ate all their meals. During the day, the teenagers came for second lunches, and there was always an odd relative or two—an accompanied child who’d awoken late from a nap, an elderly uncle in for a few days—but at night especially, when it was just a handful of us, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad for the great cavernous hall, built to feed a hundred Winslows, echoing now with our quiet conversations.

“Everyone has their own kitchen now,” bemoaned Indo one misty, late June night. We were huddled over our teacups. “Used to be the Dining Hall was the heartbeat of Winloch.” She went on to regale us with memories of nightly dinners that fed a hundred, Friday evening talent shows, and illicit romances with the waitstaff. Two tables away, Arlo, Jeffrey, and Owen were discussing how to hot-wire a powerboat. I watched Owen glance repeatedly in our direction. His gaze lingered over Lu. “My mother was a German,” Indo went on, “so we had special ‘beer hall’ nights, with Wiener schnitzel, and the waiters dressed in lederhosen, and, let me tell you, it’s hard to tear lederhosen off in the heat of the moment!”

I was instantly desperate for a moment alone with Lu—had she spoken to Owen since we’d noticed him on Flat Rocks?—but she was summoned to Trillium in the interest of a small family meal.

“Let’s meander your direction,” Indo insisted once we were alone. “Fritz hasn’t had his proper exercise today.” We rambled along toward Bittersweet at a dachshund’s pace. “So?” she asked. “Have you given any thought to my offer?”

“Your offer?” I feigned ignorance in case she had forgotten.

“My house. The opportunity to inherit—”

“Of course I’ve thought about it,” I interrupted, relieved to be
able to ask my questions, “but I don’t even know why you’d give me your house—it’s your house. Are you even allowed to do that? Isn’t there some rule in the bylaws about giving a house to a stranger? And I haven’t even found your folder yet—”

“One thing at a time, goodness, calm yourself!” Indo chuckled at my questions. “One thing at a time.” She stopped walking, then looked up and down the lane as though to check for spies. Satisfied that we were alone, she placed her two heavy hands on my shoulders and met my eyes. “I don’t just need the folder. I need solid evidence of anything untoward.”