Off Season (2 page)
“Are you warm enough?” I said to him, and then thought,
Well, of course, you’ve just been in a place a thousand times warmer. It ought to last you awhile.
Then insane, idiot laughter bubbled up, choking me, followed by great, vomit-like sobs, and I threw myself down lengthwise on the sofa because I could no longer get breath in and out of my lungs.
I’m going to die,
I thought, sucking in decades-old dust, but instead I slept. I slept without moving until the fire was embers and the room cold, and then sat up abruptly with a voice in my ears.
“Lilly, get up,” it said. “Get up and go look. The fog is gone.”
“Really,” I said fuzzily. It was not until I was out on the porch, looking up at the huge blind white eye of the moon (
“Strawberry Moon,”
said Silas, who had accompanied me), that I even wondered whose the voice was. Silas’s? Cam’s, in a dream? Not quite, but one I knew, a voice of this place, though of an earlier time. A voice with laughter in it, a good voice.
I walked through the dew-cold grass to the lip of the seawall, and there was the bay, a sheet of burning-cold silver all the way out to Great Spruce Head Island. I saw none of the lights I was accustomed to from the summer colony on Little Deer; tonight it was just me and Silas and the bay and the moon.
“Listen,” the voice said again. (Cam, almost certainly.)
I did, and took a deep, hungry breath, and the sea breathed with me.
T
here were seven of us at Edgewater that summer, if you count my brother Jeebs. None of us did, really. Jeebs was thirteen and gone into another orbit of his own; he entered ours only when he had nothing else to do, and then grudgingly.
That left Harriet Randall, aged eleven; Ben and Carolyn Forrest, who were twins, aged ten; Cecie Wentworth, aged eleven; Peter Cornish, aged twelve; and Joby Gardiner, eleven. And of course, me. Elizabeth Allen Constable but called, by my own creed, Lilly and nothing else. I was eleven that summer of 1962 and stonily determined not to be confused with my mother, who was Elizabeth, too.
My mother: Elizabeth Potter Constable; painter, activist (in her own words), great beauty. She was sporadic and only adequate at the first two, but at the third she was spectacularly successful. Turned heads followed Liz Constable wherever she went.
It was the apogee of the frenzied Jackie Kennedy mythology, and even up here in this rural saltmeadow world almost untouched by fashion for a century, women wore their hair in carefully tousled bouffants and put on crisp white sleeveless blouses and Bermuda shorts to go to the post office or general store (which were one and the same). The yacht club cocktail-and-chowder suppers looked like a Norman Rockwell magazine cover of an idyllic girls’ camp. Into the middle of all the matched Lilly Pulitzer wrap skirts and T-shirts, the huge sunglasses pushed casually above foreheads to form chic headbands, my mother would drift barefoot like an idle racing sloop, her hair in its uncombed little Greek-boy tousle of curls, her white pants smeared with paint, the striped French matelot T-shirt she had affected since a trip to Cannes when she was sixteen daubed with it. There would not be a vestige of makeup on her pure medieval features, only a flush of sunburn on her high cheekbones and a slick of Chap Stick on her full, tender mouth—a Piero della Francesca mouth, according to Brooks Burns, two cottages down, who was a classical scholar and eighty years old, and had been in love with my mother, according to my father, since she came here as a bride.
“Eyes like summer rain on the ocean,” he would say. “Eyes like clear pond ice.”
“Eyes like a frozen February crust over Eggemoggin Reach,” I might have added, “especially when those black brows come together over them.”
But I doubted that anyone but my father and Jeebs and I had seen that. My mother’s brows were two silky black slashes set straight over her eyes, which were clear, light-spilling gray and fringed with black lashes. With her sun-streaked copper curls they were striking; you expected slender sienna arches. I had those brows, I was often told, and the gray eyes, too, but even to me they often looked stormy and sulky instead of mythic. I had seen my mother, in her studio just before she came out to join us for an evening, slick her eyebrows with some sort of cream, and lightly redden her cheeks, and finger-tousle her hair before the old seashell mirror that hung beside the studio door. Once or twice I saw her daub a sunset smear on her cheek or forehead, or stain her shirt lightly with it. The result was a careless beauty seemingly preoccupied with things more important than her looks. It served her well.
I spied on my mother shamelessly during the summer. I’m still not quite sure why. I think I was looking for revelations, epiphanies, a map for knowing where the real woman and mother lay. It seemed that if I found it, I would have the map for myself, could chart a course by it. But I never did, and after that summer I did not spy on her again. Instead, I set about trying to become the direct antithesis of the woman in her mirror. It got me in endless trouble with her, though not so much with my father.
“Let her be,” he would tell her from the rocking chair on the porch that was his regular summertime emplacement. “You wouldn’t want a perfect little copy of you, would you? I would think one is enough.”
“She could do worse,” I heard my mother say once, tightly, in the days when I still eavesdropped.
“Not much,” I thought my father murmured from the rocker, but I was never sure of that.
And yet she was not all artifice. All the children from the cottages around us flocked to ours as naturally as thirsty birds to a birdbath. All the cottages down on this particular cove were members of the Middle Harbor Yacht Club, in the old Retreat Colony up the road, and had full privilege to join the brown, scabby-kneed colony children on the dock and in the tenders and small Beetle Cats in the harbor, or playing Ping-Pong in the raffish old clubhouse, or camping out on the islands in the bay across the harbor. And sometimes we did, but summer friendships are cemented early and tightly, and we came to be regarded as privileged outlanders, “too good for us,” hanging around only with each other at Liz Constable’s cottage. My mother really loved children, or, perhaps, I thought that summer, the children of others, and never seemed annoyed or bored with our endless and obscure yelping games, or the little flotilla of kayaks and Shellback dinghies that were tied up all summer beside my family’s old Friendship sloop at the end of our dock. We were the only cottage in our settlement that had a deepwater dock. All the others kept their boats at the yacht club.
Mother vanished for long periods during the day, into her studio or at the desk in her bedroom, writing letters or phoning on behalf of her causes. They were good New England liberal causes, my father often said: birth-control information for young girls, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his incendiary young civil rights battle, meals for the infirm and disenfranchised of Hancock County, cleaning up the effluent-fouled streams and bays nearby.
I know she was serious about these causes. I had seen her in tears over some social injustice or other featured on the flickery old black-and-white television in the cottage living room. And I know that there were people in the colony, women mainly, who found her indiscreet and vaguely threatening and her causes as unseemly in our little nineteenth-century fiefdom as a fart at the Chowder Race. I know too that she honestly did not care a finger flick what people thought of her activism or her painting. But she did care, secretly and profoundly, about maintaining her role as a careless natural beauty, a warm, funny woman far above artifice and agendas. I could never fathom the why of that as a child; complexity is largely beyond children.
But I still can’t today.
At noon Clara Anderson, who “did” for us mornings and who was the third generation of her family to do so for mine, would make a tray of bologna and cheese sandwiches and lemonade and put it on the big side screened porch, and we would rush in and wolf them down and be off again in a chattering swarm, out to the water or to the badminton and croquet courts my grandfather had carved out of the woods behind the cottage.
The other cottage mothers in our cove knew where to call if they had need of their children. So far as I knew, none of them ever worried that their offspring might be a bother to my mother, or that they might be in any way unsafe. Of course it was Clara who had the day-to-day burden of us, but she too liked children and had three of her own, and in our defense we had not yet absorbed any of the early-blooming horrors creeping into the cities then: drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, revolution. In Carter’s Cove, as our little settlement was called, all that came much later. The only really malicious thing I can remember us doing was setting off cherry bombs in the shabby small bathroom of the yacht club’s steward, a tight-faced fireplug-shaped young man from one of the original colony families who had not been accepted at Yale and was coldly mean-spirited to our crowd because we were not “his” kids. When our parents found out about it, we were forced to pick blueberries and wash windows and mow lawns to earn enough money for a new and vastly superior toilet. It struck us as only fair, and so we did not grouse too much about it, except that the steward got a far better toilet out of the deal and smirked at us all summer.
“Why were you so down on your mother that summer?” Cam asked me once. We had been together two months and were still in the stage where the necessity to know everything about each other, tell everything about ourselves, was paramount. On weekends, over coffee in one of the many small, dark cafés; at dinners of pizzas and cheeseburgers and an occasional salad; at night in the carapace of his old Porsche Carrera between kisses so profoundly consuming that they left us both sweating and gasping, we talked and we talked and we talked. Everything we said to each other was miraculous: the fact that he had been in the National Spelling Bee and lost by misspelling “mackerel” (I don’t eat it to this day). The fact that I had once dyed my hair green with food coloring before the Cornwell Country Day production of
Peter Pan.
(“Were you Wendy?” “No, I was the dog, Nana. A green sheepdog. I was a great hit.”)
So when he asked me about my mother and my feelings toward her that summer, I did not hesitate to spill out to him the thing I had never told anyone. Not my various best friends, certainly not Jeebs. Not my father, of course. No one.
“One day early that summer I went running up to her studio to ask her something,” I said. “I forget what. Whether we could go somewhere or other, I think. The stairs and the third-floor hall were covered in sisal matting, and I was barefoot and was sure she couldn’t hear me. It was lunchtime. We were never around her at lunchtime.
“Anyway, I got to the door of her studio and it was closed, but it always was, so in my adopted mode as supersleuth I eased the door open and looked in. She was . . . she was standing in front of her easel, facing me, and she had her shirt unbuttoned to the waist and was holding it open, and old Brooks Burns was standing in front of her with his hands all over her breasts, crawling like old spiders. Every now and then he’d bend over and smack one of them, or suck at it. He was making a kind of whistling noise in his throat; I thought maybe he was dying. She was smiling at him. It was . . . a sweet smile. Tender, like she’d give a child. After a while she said something to him and kissed him on the cheek, still smiling, and buttoned up her blouse and turned back to her easel and picked up her brush. He stood there awhile, gasping like a gaffed fish, and started to turn and leave. I was out of there and down the steps before I could get a deep breath. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up, and stayed in my bed under the covers all that day. I couldn’t let anyone in, not Clara, not my father, not my summer best friend, Cecie Wentworth.
“After dinner, my mother came in with a tray of toast and milk and started to sit down beside me and—I don’t know—feel my forehead or feed me or something. I said, ‘No,’ and turned over facing the wall. In a minute I heard her set the tray down and go out of my room and shut the door.”
Cam was silent for a while, tracing the line of my jaw with his fingertip. Then he said, “You never cut her much slack, did you?”
“Slack? My God! That old . . . satyr! You should have seen it.”
“Did it ever occur to you that she might have been doing him an exceedingly kind thing?”
“Not once,” I said, knowing the truth of what he said. Tears burned in my eyes. “Never once.”
The memory of that day stuck like a burr in my brain. I tried to dislodge it; I was not prepared to give up my grand and secret anomie. But I could feel it begin to trickle away like sand out of a sieve.
“Well,” Cam said, “I know if I was old and you showed me your beautiful boobs it would be an act of spectacular kindness.”
“That’s different.”
“Why is it?”
I did not answer, and presently he said, “Was she like that? I mean when you were back home, in school and all that?”
I remember that I stared at him for a long moment. It was something that had never occurred to me. “No,” I said slowly, thinking back to the winters in Washington that followed those summers. “No, she wasn’t. She was different at Edgewater. Come to think of it, we all were.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“It was just . . . simpler there. Nothing changed. In our colony, in all those old colonies, not much had changed since the first people came there. Nothing much was new. If somebody painted a veranda or built a porch or bought a new piece of furniture, no matter how broken-down the old one was, people talked about it for weeks. New people hardly ever came in, except to visit. We ate the same things at the same time that our parents and grandparents had, or so my father said, and the grown-ups went to the same porches for cocktails and the club had the same regattas with the same boats every year, and it seemed to me that we even wore the same things every summer that I could remember, things we’d left at Edgewater. And we played the same games, children’s games that we wouldn’t have been caught dead playing at home. It was like all of us slipped back into some kind of idyllic summer time warp; it was like time stopped. I wonder why I never thought about that before. It was a whole other life and nobody seemed to know or question it.”