Home Schooling (20 page)

She closed her eyes and heard, from the direction of the sandbox, a piercing shriek. She got up and stumbled over to Logan, the letter and photograph still clutched in her hand. A little girl screamed that Logan had thrown sand at her. Tears rolled down her red, crumpled face. The little girl's mother hurried over to the sandbox.

“Let me see, Emily,” the little girl's mother said. “Are you hurt?”

Hurt? Marisa thought. Hurt, from a little sand?

“Did it get in your eyes?” the woman said. She demanded of Logan: “Did you throw sand at Emily?” Logan squinted up at her. Emily looked fine, apart from a telltale glint of sand in the flawless parting of her yellow hair. Marisa saw Logan's dilemma. There was evidence; there was probably a motive. Still, she thought he'd be wiser not to admit guilt — not here, anyway. She'd talk to him later. Isolde had told her Logan had lots of friends at preschool and, if he wanted, could go on a play date every single day. Remembering Isolde's fondness for Logan made Marisa smile. Emily's mother gave her a suspicious look and wiped Emily's eyes with a tissue. Emily pushed her away.

“Now, don't be like that,” Emily's mother said.

She smiled at Marisa. She said her name was Grace. Her skin was pale, her eyes a light glassy blue. She invited Marisa to join her Tai Chi class, at ten in the morning, in the annex behind the swimming pool.

“After class, we go to the dining room for tea. Please come. We'd love to get to know you.”

Marisa said, well, she had Logan.

“Oh, there's a drop-in play group. Didn't anyone tell you?” she said.

“No, I missed that,” said Marisa. She looked at Logan. He stuck his thumb in his mouth. “Don't do that, Logan,” she said. Did everyone guess she was a fraud, neither wife nor mother? “It's okay,” she said to Logan. “I used to suck my thumb, too.” He was pale, the skin under his eyes bruised-looking. He broke her heart, this kid.

“Five more minutes,” she said, “and then we'll go find Daddy.”

She went back to the bench and looked again at Norman's letter and the photograph of Teresa and Pawel. Were they real, she wondered? Did they exist? Norman was quite capable of inventing a fiancée and an economic venture, or anything else that suited him.

The dining room had a low ceiling of knotty pine, darkened with age, and a row of small windows smudged and pitted from the sea air, so that even in this bright, clear weather the sky outside appeared overcast and dismal. Emily, the little girl from the sandbox, was in front of Marisa and Ben and Logan in the line-up. Emily was wearing overalls and had pink ribbons in her pigtails. She turned around and pulled a face at Logan and he pushed her. Emily's father glared at Logan. He put his arm around Emily and leaned over, as if shielding her from harm. According to his nametag, he was Mike.

“Emily,” he said, “you stay here with Daddy.”

“Logan,” Marisa said, “you stay with me.” She spooned some green beans onto his plate. She talked him into having a little salad. A little mashed potato? she suggested. He shook his head. “That's enough, lady,” he kept saying. “No problem, Bub,” she said.

Marisa heard Emily saying that mashed potatoes made her throw up. She only liked spaghetti.

“There isn't any spaghetti,” Mike said. “There are just these nice potatoes. See, you put a teeny bit of butter on them, like this.”

Someone touched Marisa's arm. It was Grace. She stepped into line with her tray. She speared a slice of ham and said, “Marisa, I didn't see you in my Tai Chi class.”

“I know,” Marisa said. “I'm sorry.”

“Oh, don't,” Grace said. “Don't say sorry. Come sit with us for dinner. We'll have a chance to talk.”

Marisa smiled and nodded. She poured gravy on her mashed potatoes, because what the heck, carbohydrates might calm her nerves. But, hey, how could you not love these things? The fatigue, the frayed nerves, the ennui followed by a sudden combative urge. Not to mention the paper banner on the wall that proclaimed:
Healing the Family Week!!
How could you not love it?

Marisa and Ben took their trays out onto the deck and sat at a table shaded by a green umbrella that swivelled every now and then in the on-shore breeze. They swatted wasps away from their food and tried to keep the paper napkins from blowing away.

Marisa waved at Grace and shrugged, as if to say, sorry, we just couldn't find a table near you; everyone had come outside to eat, due to the stifling heat in the dining room. Next to Marisa and Ben sat Sharon, the program director, in vivid turquoise shorts and top, crimson polish on her toenails. The man sitting with her was someone Marisa often saw striding across the lawns with books and papers under his arm, head down, dark glasses concealing his eyes. His name was Garth, Ben had told Marisa, and he was a popular motivational speaker. Ben had seen him once or twice on public television. Garth was also a director at Serenity Cove, or, rumour had it, the owner. He wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt that revealed his muscular chest and shoulders. He was tall and had a Celtic cross tattooed on his forearm. Later, when the meal was more or less over, people drew their chairs closer to Garth. He waited for quiet and then opened a book, held it at a solemn distance, and read: “‘From my own voice resonant — singing the phallus. Singing
the song of procreation …'” He paused, then went on, in a strong, authoritative, agreeable voice: “‘Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people.'”

The words of the poem, which seemed to emanate not from Garth but from a benevolent and disembodied source, washed over Marisa as if they came from the depths of the sea. The spell cast by the words was shattered, however, when Mike said, “That's so cool.” Grace said, “I know. That's Whitman, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Garth. “It's Whitman. ‘Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people.' That's us, wouldn't you say?”

“Yes,” said the others. “Oh, yes, that's us, definitely.”

Marisa leaned closer to Ben and said, “I love a little poetry after dinner.” Ben smiled thinly. A wasp zeroed in on Logan's dish of ice cream and Logan, startled, threw his spoon into the air and it landed on the deck, which made him cry. Marisa picked it up and said she'd get him a clean spoon, but in the dining room the cutlery tray was empty. She went to the kitchen door and asked if she could rinse the spoon off at the sink. Without a word a young man removed the spoon from her hand. The staff at Serenity Cove worked with a negative energy she found irresistible. They crashed dishes around in the sink and dropped knives on the floor and kicked them out of the way and left the fridge door open. They were, she understood, recruited from the island's year-round population, and in all probability resented being underpaid and overworked. She'd seen the coldly disdainful looks they gave the guests, the same kind of look she caught when the spoon, washed and dried, was returned to her.

In the kitchen the air was humid and thick with the smell of cooked meat and boiled potatoes and induced in Marisa a kind of torpor, so that she was unable to move.

“Can I get you anything?” a young woman asked her.

“No,” Marisa said. “No, that's okay.” Her thoughts were all churned up.
The needs of superb children,
she thought. She leaned against the doorframe. So this was it, she thought: everything about this place reminded her of the church-run camp she'd been sent to the summer her mother's health got worse. At Camp Zaragoza, she'd made lists:
flowers, hearts, sand-dollars,
silly, inconsequential things, carefully printed on a scrap of paper, to help keep her thoughts pinned-down and orderly, instead of flying around in her head like bats. She'd had to take a Bible with her. It was on another list — an official list — along with two bathing suits, insect repellent, a flashlight. Her mother had got out of bed and had gone down to the basement, where she'd found a Bible in a box of old books. Marisa remembered her mother wiping the dust off the Bible. Before handing it to Marisa she had opened it and had read:
In the beginning,
as if the words surprised her. The Bible had print so tiny the words appeared sly, furtive, guarded. Marisa had liked it, though, the way it smelled, of dust and antiquity, and the small weight of it in her hands, and the fact that her mother had given it to her. Unfortunately, it turned out everyone at Camp Zaragoza had a new Bible written in a plainer style, with coloured maps of The Holy Land. The woman in charge, who was called Senorita, because she'd been a missionary in Mexico, took the old Bible away from Marisa and loaned her one with large clear print. Then she was assigned to a class for kids who'd flunked the test in Bible knowledge, where she was given multiple-choice tests:
Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac: a) on a mountain in the land of Moriah, b) on Mount Ararat, c) beside the pyramids in Egypt.

She'd hated Camp Zaragoza. And here it was again. The sun was beating in the kitchen windows and in the middle of the room flies circled furiously. When she went outside to the deck with the spoon, Ben was gathering up their plates, because the wasps were frightening Logan.

That evening, games of horseshoes and tag and hide-and-go-seek were organized on the lawn above the beach. After the games a fire was lit in the fire pit below the dining room, in front of the beach. Everyone sat around in a circle and roasted marshmallows and sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and “If I Had a Hammer.” Logan sang along. His chin was gooey with melted marshmallow. He and Emily sat on the grass in front of Marisa, who stared into the flames.

She was far away, in a different place, thinking about her last day at Camp Zaragoza, when Senorita had called her into her office and said she had something very serious to tell her. She still couldn't think about it without feeling chilled and weak. Senorita had told Marisa her mother had gone to be with the angels. Then she'd made her sit down and lower her head and then someone, one of the camp counsellors, brought her a glass of warm ginger ale. What Senorita had told her had seemed outrageous. Her mother would never leave her. Marisa had tried to impress on her the truth: her mother did at times get sick, she'd have a fever and go to bed, but she always got better. She and Norman would make her weak tea, the kind she liked, with cinnamon and a little milk. Their mother said it did her good. She always got better. This was what Marisa wanted to tell Senorita.

In Senorita's office there was a metal table with an electric kettle, a teacup, and a jar of instant coffee on it. On the wall there was a calendar with a picture of the Holy Spirit dove-like over a Midwestern wheat field. At Sunday morning services, Senorita spoke in tongues, which sent Marisa and some other girls from the remedial Bible class into fits of giggling: another strange, uncontrollable visitation. Later, they were punished by being confined to their cabins or given Bible verses to memorize. In Senorita's office all that seemed forgiven, if not forgotten. Senorita held Marisa, enveloping her in surprisingly spongy and yielding flesh that smelled of harsh soap, cafeteria food, and the dusty, fragile pages of the old Bible, returned to her by Senorita before she left the office. Later,
Senorita instructed all the campers to join hands in a circle with Marisa. They recited the Lord's Prayer and sang, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Marisa felt nothing. Her heart was a little stone thing. For the rest of the day she waited for her father to come and get her. She had her sleeping bag baled with twine, her clothes packed in a gym bag. She slipped her lists of words into the old Bible, marking the story of Abraham and Isaac alone on the mountain in the land of Moriah, the two of them laid waste by intention and capitulation and devotion.

Every time she thought about it, Marisa remembered the ride home differently. It was pouring with rain, it was a sunny day, it was the dead of night. There were frogs leaping across the road. Lightning split a tree and it crashed to the road in front of the truck. Her father was silent, morose; he drank a can of beer as he drove. Norman was reading; he had his feet up on the dash. Or he was asleep. Or perhaps he wasn't in the truck; perhaps he'd stayed at home, and was waiting for Marisa on the porch, in the dark, alone.

Don't think about it, she told herself. Banish it. But she couldn't. It was being here, at Serenity Cove. It's not fair, she thought. I'm not registered in a workshop; I don't even have a therapist.

She and Logan went down to the beach and Logan waved at a seaplane as it banked and gained altitude and headed toward the Coast Mountains.

“
Bienvenido,
” Logan shouted. He looked at her uncertainly and said, “He didn't hear me.”

“He might have,” said Marisa. “I think for sure he saw you.”

Logan said he was going in a plane to see his mother. A big plane, he said, holding his arms wide. He was going to sit with the pilot. The pilot knew where his mother lived. “I'm going there,” he said. “I'm going to Argentina.”

“I know you are,” Marisa said. “You're going to see your mommy.”

“Are you coming, too?” he said.

“No, I don't think so,” she said. She pointed out a heron standing in the shallows. A duck paddling around a log floating in the water, two people gliding past in a kayak. Logan gave these things a critical look, as if he considered their existence debatable. The beach was not sand, but sandstone.

Sandstone, she told Logan, was a kind of sedimentary rock, shaped by the tide and storms into all these interesting whirls and loops. “It looks like a birthday cake, doesn't it?” she said, running her hands over the rock. “It looks like cake batter.”

He appeared dubious. “A black cake?” he said. “A cake that's made of rock?”

“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

Marisa jumped from one outcropping of sandstone to another, nearly losing her balance once. Logan tried to do the same, but he got scared. “Stop, Marisa,” he cried, and she did stop. He took her hand. She smiled at him. They were friends, she thought. She wanted to tell Logan that she'd lost her mother, too, but in her case the loss was permanent and deep as a well, and she didn't know how to explain that to herself, never mind to a child. He'd figure it out, of course, just from knowing her, because it was part of her, like the shape of her hands.