Bittersweet (5 page)

Arriving under cover of darkness had given a disappointing first impression, made worse by the threat of Birch’s inspection and my fate in the face of our failure. The house had seemed all dingy fixtures and shabby, unmatched furniture, touched everywhere with the scent of mildew; all I saw was work.

But I understood now, as I took in the shining brass beds in the morning, the crisp cotton duvet covers, and the faint scent of coffee wafting in from the kitchen, that this was a quiet place, a country place, a place of baguettes and pink grapefruit and spreadable honeycomb, idyllic and sun-drenched in a way I had never known, but of which I had long been dreaming.

Ev’s bed, the twin of my own, lay empty under the opposite window, rumpled sheets cast aside. From the light and birdsong, I could guess it was no later than eight. In the nine months I had lived with Ev, I had never once seen her up before ten. I called her name twice,
but there was no reply. I puzzled for a few moments over her whereabouts, before lying back and closing my eyes, willing more delicious sleep. It refused me.

I felt a hint of desire. I listened long and hard. I was truly alone. And so I (shyly, bravely) put my hand down between my legs and felt myself grow wet. I knew there was a risk Ev might barge through the door any second, so I told myself to hold still, to move only one finger, to feign sleep. It is strange how such restrictions heighten one’s desire, but there it is. Soon my fingers were buried deep and I was in another world.

I tried to remember to listen. But there were always a few moments in which even I could not be cautious enough to subdivide my mind. I threw off the covers and felt that private wildness inside me rise up and carry me over a great, shivering chasm of joy, the only unbridled pleasure I knew.

It took time to recover myself. Afterward, I lay there, legs splayed, eyes closed, grateful for the warmth inside of me, until I felt the particular sensation of being watched. I lifted my eyes to the window just above Ev’s bed.

There, framed by wood and glass, was the face of a man.

His eyes were glazed over.

His mouth was agape.

I screamed. He ducked. I covered my whole self with the quilt. I laughed, horrified, nearly suffocating under the duvet. Almost burst into tears. Peeked out from beneath the quilt again. The window was empty. Had there really been someone there? Oh god. A new level of humiliation. I would never forget the look on his face—a mix of lust (I hoped) and horror (more likely). He’d been freckled. Dirty blond hair. I could feel myself blushing from head to toe. When I got up the nerve, I strode to the window, wrapped in the comforter, and wrestled the resistant, dusty blind down into submission before
dressing myself with nunlike modesty. Maybe they’d kick me out of Winloch before we even got to the inspection.

Ev returned an hour later, moss tangling her locks. She smelled like a child who’d been playing in the forest, and her face bloomed with a smile she was doing her best to hide. Eager for distraction, I offered to cook, but she insisted I sit at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and let her do the work for once, a dubious allowance, since I knew that she could hardly boil water without setting the kettle on fire. As she bustled about the white metal cabinets, art deco refrigerator with a heavy, ka-thunking door pull, and dirty seafoam-green linoleum curling up at the edges, my fingers traced the repeating, once-vibrant pattern of blackberries and gingham that had protected the table during someone else’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

The kitchen had once been the short part of the L that made up the porch, and it retained the casement windows from its earlier life as a sunroom. Because the waist-to-ceiling panes overlooked the Bittersweet cove, what might have been a gloomy room glittered, making it the most beautiful spot in the cottage. But I resisted the view, keeping my back to the woods and water, remembering, with fresh embarrassment, the feeling of that man’s eyes upon me. He was out there, somewhere. What was to keep him from telling? The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

“Galway said he met you this morning,” Ev mentioned, casually clicking on the stove’s pilot light to heat the green enamel percolator set on the back burner. My pulse began to race. That man in the window was the only person I’d seen all day. Did she know? Had he told her? Had she read my mind?

“He’s pretty awkward,” she said apologetically. She glanced at me for a moment, catching the expression on my face. “Was he awful to you?”

“What’d he say?” I managed to squeak.

Ev rolled her eyes. “Galway doesn’t say anything unless it serves his own political gains.” I breathed a sigh of relief as she babbled on. “Don’t worry, he’s only coming up weekends.” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially, as if I had any idea what she was talking about. “Now you know firsthand why he’s terrible with women,” she chirped, as I resolved simply never to see Galway again, whoever he was, while Ev went on to tell me how ill-equipped her brothers were for any kind of love, even though two of the three of them had managed to find wives. But Galway would be a bachelor forever, although she was almost positive he wasn’t gay, he seemed extremely hetero to her, mostly because he was an asshole, and if she was going to pick one of them to be gay she would have picked fussy Athol, although Banning was such a pleasure seeker (this is how I gathered, with horror, that Galway was her brother)—and then she served me a burned scrambled egg and lukewarm, bitter coffee, rendered drinkable only after I added a healthy slug from a dented can of condensed milk found on the shelf above the sink, and gave dictation on the provisions and products we would need John to pick up in town for the coming days of cleaning.

Even then, I was glad I’d come.

T
he cottage Ev stood to inherit had been inhabited, until her demise the previous summer, by Ev’s great-aunt Antonia Winslow. Although Ev insisted the ancient woman hadn’t actually died in the house, it was easy to imagine that the yellowed piles of papers that lined every room, or the permeating combination of animal urine and mildew that radiated from the furniture, or the sulfuric smell bubbling from the pipes every time we turned on the water, might well have conspired to bring about her end.

I expected Ev to be overwhelmed in the face of such disrepair, but she seemed energized by the challenge of it. I thought I’d be the one to teach her that newspapers and a touch of vinegar were best for windows, or that you diluted the Pine-Sol in a bucket of warm water, but her years spent getting into trouble at boarding school had taught her plenty about deep and thorough cleaning. Covered in dust after spending three hours sorting and binding the papers from the living room, I asked her, “Why do you have to clean this place?” After all, the Winslows could afford the help; this backbreaking labor seemed to contradict everything that photograph above my desk had appeared to promise.

“We believe in hard work,” she said, tucking a piece of hair back into the bandanna she’d tied over her head. “It’s tradition: when we
turn eighteen, we’re each offered a cottage—usually the oldest, dirtiest one available. And then it’s up to us to make it livable. To prove ourselves.” She frowned. “It’s been the big joke that when it’s my turn I won’t be able to hack it.” And then she met my eyes. “But they’re wrong, aren’t they?”

Her vulnerability hit me in the gut. I knew what it was to be doubted. To need to prove yourself. “Of course they’re wrong.” And so, for the next six days, we both went to town on that cottage and its five little rooms—bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, sun-porch—as though our lives, and not merely our summers, depended on it.

Once we’d cleared away the superficial mess (even if the backbreaking labor didn’t feel superficial), it became apparent that Bittersweet was a tidy cottage, good-boned after a hundred years, even if its musculature showed its age. On blustery nights, the wind sang through invisible gaps between the casements and their frames. The off-white bead board walls had been slapped with paint dozens of times, rendering the grooves between some of the slats all but nonexistent. What furniture we were able to salvage was mismatched: in one corner of the living room, a wooden chair with a fraying straw seat waited humbly before a nicked mahogany desk that had once been part of a grander household, while in the other corner, a sagging red chair with cotton spilling from its split corduroy upholstery held the distinguished position as most coveted reading spot in the house.

On our second afternoon, John returned with the groceries we’d ordered. He had delivered our box of cleaning products the previous day with what I took to be silent grudgingness, but when I’d asked Ev about it she’d replied, “It’s his job,” which was how I’d found out he was a servant.

Lest Ev confuse me with the help, I let her and John unload
while I sank into the red chair with a glass of lemonade. I watched Abby drop a browned, balding tennis ball onto Bittersweet’s uneven floorboards, painted a flaking Portuguese blue. The ball rolled in a straight line toward the crumbling brick fireplace, with its tarnished brass andirons, before inexplicably turning around the curve of a faded rag rug and heading north, toward the dimly lit wooden bathroom, with its stained sink and pull-chain toilet.

Abby’s ears twitched with excitement as she traced the ball’s trajectory. She panted as though it were alive, but I held her back, fascinated to see where it would end up if we left it alone. Sure enough, it hit upon a burl, cascading east again and nearly into the cottage’s bedroom before plunging, along the line of a sunken floorboard, straight south toward the cove, back across my path, through the close living room, and into the jewel of the kitchen. I jumped up and followed. The old ball pinged against the metal cabinet that housed the deep porcelain sink, then through the doorway that separated kitchen from living room. On this new, northwest course, it headed into the screened-in porch, with its worn wicker couch, half-patched screens that allowed in the whistling breeze, and private view of the watery cove below.

The ball landed at John’s feet as he stepped through the yawning screen door. He picked it up and tossed it outside. Abby gamely followed. “Why’d you let her in here?” he asked crossly.

I hadn’t.

John dumped the last bag on the kitchen table and headed back out onto the porch just as Ev came through the doorway. Her body blocked his way. She jutted her hip out playfully. He sidestepped, pretending to ignore her, lifting a piece of mail off one of the many stacks of newspapers, rain-warped and moldy, that lined the porch.

“Antonia Winslow,” he intoned in an attempt at a Waspy voice, before dropping the paper back onto the pile and making a move
toward the door, then reached for his jacket pocket. “Right, I forgot.” He pulled out three bolts just like the one I’d seen on Ev’s Manhattan bedroom door.

A cloud passed over Ev’s face. “You’re not serious.”

“You want to get me fired?”

Ev sighed. John left to get his tools from the truck.

“What’re those for?” I asked once he was gone.

Ev rolled her eyes. “My mother is terrified of bears.”

John returned and set to work, drilling holes and turning screws into the wooden frame. The muscles in his arms rippled as he worked, and I realized Ev and I were watching him in mutual, unabashed wonder. The glazed expression on her face reminded me of what Galway had looked like at the window, and I slipped into the kitchen as I felt myself turn scarlet.

It wasn’t until later that night, long after John had whistled to Abby and gunned his engine into the afternoon, that I noticed the other two bolts now installed on the insides of the bedroom and bathroom doors. Bears? Really?

With every inch of Bittersweet I cleaned, I came to know it as my own. I shoved armfuls of Antonia Winslow’s personal papers into garbage bags already filled with decades of other abandoned piles: calendars, shopping lists, newspapers. I sorted the magazines into their own pile, aching for the day I could flip through them. I lugged the garbage bags down to the crawl space below the porch to store them until we could make a trip to the dump and properly recycle them.

“Just think of when we’re old ladies,” Ev said, as she scrubbed at the grout around the kitchen sink, knuckles bleeding. “We’ll sit on the porch and drink martinis.” My heart leapt when I realized what she was promising—a lifetime of Winloch. And so I joined her. As I scraped flaky paint from the windowsills, I admired our view out of the warped windowpanes, through which the straight trunks
curved and parried whenever I moved my head. I braved rickety chairs to poke a rag-covered broom handle at the decades-old cobwebs hanging above the fireplace bookshelves. I bent before the cabinet underneath the bathroom sink, sorting through glass bottles and aluminum jars that held dried-up calamine lotion and the lingering camphor of Noxzema. We were positively nineteenth century, bundling up all the linens and sending them out to be washed, concocting strange recipes to use up the canned peas, Spam, and cream of mushroom soup that had been stashed on the pine shelves in the kitchen long enough to accumulate a thick layer of dust. Ev gobbled down the expired food as if it were caviar. Whereas for me, such meals brought up bad memories, for her, it was a point of pride—for the first time in her life, she was eating what she had earned.

O
n the fourth day, it rained. The constant patter was comforting, the best memory I’d brought from the Pacific Northwest. Though the cottage uttered small complaints against the gusts buffeting up from the cove, the roof did not leak (save for a spot in the bathroom, but that was nothing a rusty, pinging Sanka can couldn’t fix), and the damp air wafting in from the screen porch somehow made our cleaning feel all the more appreciated.

It was good to roll up my sleeves and see results. But it wasn’t lost on me that part of why I was burrowing, so gamely, into the cleaning—beyond the time alone with Ev and what my elbow grease might secure for me—was that it gave me a reason to hide. I could taste the humiliation anew every time I thought of Ev’s brother’s face in the window. Saturday loomed, when Birch would descend and give us the thumbs-up or -down. As the week drew to a close, I comforted myself in knowing I wouldn’t have to step beyond the walls of Bittersweet at least until after our inspector arrived.