Bittersweet (3 page)

I gritted my teeth and told myself to be strong, that I didn’t need the damn boots. I could just write to my father and ask for a pair (why hadn’t I done that already?). I didn’t need a Degas-bestowing supermodel snob lying around my room, reminding me what a nothing I was. I gripped the doorknob and told myself to say it how Ev would say it, formulated “Fuck, Ev, could you smoke somewhere else?” (I would make my voice nonchalant, as though my objection was philosophical and not an expression of poverty), and barged in.

She usually smoked atop her desk beside the window, cigarette perched in the corner of her mouth, or cross-legged on the top bunk, ashing into an empty soda bottle. But this time, she wasn’t there. As I dropped my bag, I imagined with delighted gloom that she’d left a cigarette smoldering on the bedclothes before heading out to some glamorous destination—the Russian Tea Room, a private rooftop in Tribeca. The whole dorm was doomed to go up in flames,
and I would go down with it. She would be forced to remember me forever.

And then I heard it: a sniffle. I squinted at the top bunk. The comforter quivered.

“Ev?”

The sound of soft crying.

I approached. I was still in my drenched jeans, but this was electrifying.

I stood at that awkward angle, neck craned up. She was really under there. I wondered what to do as her voice began to break into a full, throaty sob. “Are you okay?” I asked.

I didn’t expect her to answer. And I certainly didn’t mean to put my hand on her back. Had I been thinking clearly, I never would have dared—my anger was too proud; the gesture, too intimate. But my little touch elicited unexpected results. First, it made her cry harder. Then it made her turn in the bed, so that her face and mine were much closer than they’d ever been and I could see every millimeter of her flooding, Tiffany-blue eyes; her stained, rosy cheeks; her greasy blond hair, limp for the first time since I’d known her. Her mouth faltered, and I couldn’t help but put my hand to her hot temple. She looked so much more human this close up.

“What happened?” I asked, when she’d finally calmed.

For a moment it seemed as if she might start sobbing again. Instead, she fished out another cigarette and lit it. “My cousin,” she said, as if that told the whole thing.

“What’s your cousin’s name?” I didn’t think I could stand not to know what was breaking Ev’s heart.

“Jackson,” she whispered, the corners of her mouth turning down. “He’s a soldier. Was,” she corrected herself, and her tears spilled all over again.

“He was killed?”

She shook her head. “He came back last summer. I mean, he was
acting a little strange and everything, but I didn’t think …” And then she cried. She cried so hard that I slipped off my parka and jeans and got in bed beside her and held her quaking body.

“He shot himself. In the mouth. Last week,” she said finally, what seemed like hours later, when we were lying beside each other under her four-ply red cashmere throw, staring up at the cracked ceiling as if this was what we did all the time. It was a relief to finally hear what had happened; I had started to wonder if this cousin hadn’t walked into a post office and shot everyone up.

“Last week?” I asked.

She turned to me, touching our foreheads. “Mum didn’t tell me until last night. After the reception.” Her nose and eyes began to pinken in anticipation of another round of tears. “She didn’t want me to get upset and ‘ruin things.’ ”

“Oh, Ev,” I sympathized, filling with forgiveness. That was why she had snapped at me after the party—she was grief-stricken.

“What was Jackson like?” I pushed, and she began to weep again. It was so strange and lovely to be lying next to her, feeling her flaxen hair against my cheek, watching the great globes of sorrow trail down her smooth face. I didn’t want it to end. I knew that to stop speaking would be to lose her again.

“He was a good guy, you know? Like, last summer? One of his mom’s dogs, Flip, was running on the gravel road and this asshole repair guy came around the curve at, like, fifty miles an hour and hit the dog and it made this awful sound”—she shuddered—“and Jackson just walked right over there and picked Flip up in his arms—I mean, everyone else was screaming and crying, it, like, happened in front of all the little kids—and he carried her over to the grass and rubbed her ears.” She closed her eyes again. “And afterward, he put a blanket over her.”

I looked at the picture of the gathered Winslows above my desk, although it was as silly an enterprise as opening the menu of a diner
you’ve been going to your whole life; I knew every blond head, every slim calf, as though her family was my own. “This was at your summer place, right?”

She pronounced the name as if for the first time. “Winloch.”

I could feel her eyes examining the side of my face. What she said next, she said carefully. Even though my heart skipped a beat, I measured my expectations, telling myself that was the last I’d hear of it:

“You should come.”

“D
o they know we’re coming?” I asked as Ev handed me the rest of the Kit Kat bar I’d bought in the dining car. The train had long since whistled twice and headed farther north, leaving us with empty track and each other.

“Naturally.” Ev sniffed with a trace of doubt as she settled, again, on top of her suitcase under the overhang of the stationmaster’s office. She regarded my orange copy of
Paradise Lost
disdainfully, then checked her cell phone for the twentieth time, cursing the lack of service. “And now we’ll only have six days before the inspection.”

“Inspection?”

“Of the cottage.”

“Who’s inspecting it?”

I could tell from the way she blinked straight ahead that my questions were an annoyance. “Daddy, of course.”

I tried to make my voice as benign as possible. “You sound concerned.”

“Well of course I’m concerned,” she said with a pout, “because if we don’t get that little hovel shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it. And then you’ll go home and I’ll have to live under the same roof as my mother.”

Her mouth was set to snarl at whatever I said next, so instead of
voicing all the questions flooding my mind—“You mean I might still have to go home? You mean you, of all people, have to clean your own house?”—I looked across the tracks to a tangle of chickadees leapfrogging from one branch to the next, and sucked in the fresh northern air.

An invitation marks the beginning of something, but it’s more of a gesture than an actual beginning. It’s as if a door swings open and sits there gaping, right in front of you, but you don’t get to walk through it yet. I know this now, but back then, I thought that everything had begun, and, by everything, I mean the friendship that quickly burned hot between me and Ev, catching fire the night she told me of Jackson’s death and blazing through the spring, as Ev taught me how to dance, who to talk to, and what to wear, while I tutored her in chemistry and convinced her that, if she’d only apply herself, she’d stop getting Ds. “She’s the brainiac,” she’d started to brag warmly, and I liked the statement mostly because it meant she saw us as a pair, strolling across the quad arm in arm, drinking vodka tonics at off-campus parties, blowing off her druggie friends for a Bogart movie marathon. From the vantage point of June, I could see my belonging sprouting from that day in February, when Ev had uttered those three dulcet words: “You should come.”

Over the course of the spring, in each note scribbled on the back of a discarded dry-cleaning receipt, in each secretive call to my dorm room, my mother had intimated I should be wary of life’s newfound generosity. As usual, I’d found her warnings (as I did nearly everything that flowed from her) Depressing, Insulting, and Predictable—in her way, she assumed Ev was just using me (“For what?” I asked her incredulously. “What on earth could someone like Ev possibly use me for?”). But I also assumed, once my father reluctantly agreed to the summer’s arrangement, that she would lay off, if only because, by mid-May, Ev had peeled her Winloch photograph
off the wall, I’d put the bulk of my belongings into a wooden crate in the dorm’s fifth-floor attic, and my summer plans—as far as I saw them—were set in stone.

So the particular call that rang through Ev’s Upper East Side apartment, the one that came the June night before Ev and I were to get on that northbound train, was surprising. Ev and I were chop-sticking Thai out of take-out containers, sprawled across the antique four-poster bed in her bedroom, where I’d been sleeping for two blissful weeks, the insulated windowpanes and mauve curtains blocking out any inconvenient sound blasting up from Seventy-Third Street (a blessed contrast to Aunt Jeanne’s wretched spinster cave, where I’d spent the last two weeks of May, counting down the days to Manhattan). My suitcase lay splayed at my feet. The Oriental rug was scattered with sturdy bags: Prada, Burberry, Chanel. We’d already put in our half-hour jog on side-by-side treadmills in her mother’s suite and were discussing which movie we’d watch in the screening room. Tonight, especially, we were worn out from rushing to the Met before it closed so Ev could show me her family’s donations, as she’d promised her father she would. I’d stood in front of two swarthily paired Gauguins, and all I could think to say was “But I thought you had three brothers.”

Ev had laughed and wagged her finger. “You’re right, but the third’s an asshole who auctioned his off and donated the proceeds to Amnesty International. Mum and Daddy nearly threw him off the roof deck.” Said roof deck lay atop the building’s eighth floor, which was taken up entirely by the Winslows’ four-thousand-square-foot apartment. Even though I was naïve about the Winslows’ money, I already understood that what summed up their status resided not in their mahogany furnishings or priceless art but, rather, in the Central Park vistas offered from nearly every one of the apartment’s windows: a pastoral view in the middle of an overpopulated city, something seemingly impossible and yet effortlessly achieved.

I could only imagine how luxurious their summer estate would be.

At the phone’s second bleating, Ev answered in a voice like polished glass, “Winslow residence,” looked confused for an instant, then regained her composure. “Mrs. Dagmar,” she enthused in her voice reserved for adults. “How wonderful to hear from you.” She held the phone to me, then flopped onto the bed, burying herself in the latest
Vanity Fair
.

“Mom?” I lifted the receiver to my ear.

“Honey-bell.”

Instantly, I could smell my mother’s pistachio breath, but any longing was pushed down by the memory of how these phone calls usually ended.

“Your father says tomorrow’s the big day.”

“Yup.”

“Honey-bell,” she repeated. “Your father’s set the whole thing up with Mr. Winslow, and I don’t need to remind you that they’re being very generous.”

“Yup,” I replied, feeling myself bristle. Who knew what Birch had finally said to get my reluctant, sullen father to agree to let me miss three months of punishing labor, but whatever it was, it had worked, and thank god for it. Still, I found it borderline insulting to suggest my father had had anything to do with “setting the whole thing up” when he’d barely tolerated it, and was reminded of how my mother always sided with him, even when (especially when) her face held the pink imprint of his hand. My eyes scanned the intricate pattern of Ev’s rug.

“Do you have a hostess gift? Candles maybe? Soap?”

“Mom.”

Ev glanced up at the sharpness in my voice. She smiled and shook her head before drifting back into the magazine.

“Mr. Winslow told your father they don’t have service up there.”

“Service?”

“You know, cell phone, Internet.” My mother sounded flustered. “It’s one of the family rules.”

“Okay,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to—”

“So we’ll write then.”

“Great. Bye, Mom.”

“Wait.” Her voice became bold. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

I absentmindedly eyed a long, thick bolt on the inside of Ev’s bedroom door. In the two weeks I’d slept in that room, I’d never given it much thought, but now, examining how sturdy it looked, I was struck with wondering: why on earth would a girl like Ev want to lock out any part of her perfect life? “Yes?”

“It’s not too late.”

“For what?”

“To change your mind. We’d love to have you home. You know that, don’t you?”

I almost burst out laughing. But then I thought of her burned meat loaf, sitting, lonely, in the middle of the table, with just my father to share it. Microwaved green beans, limp, in their brown juices. Rum and Cokes. No point in rubbing my freedom in. “I need to go.”

“Just one more thing.”

It was all I could do not to slam the receiver down. I’d been perfectly warm, hadn’t I? And listened plenty? How could I ever make her understand that this very conversation with her, laden with everything I was trying to escape, made Winloch, with no cell phones or Internet, sound like heaven?

I could feel her trying to figure out how to put it, her exhalations flushing into the receiver as she formulated the words. “Be sweet,” she said finally.