The Summer Cottage (2 page)

C
HAPTER
2

 

A
s soon as the bedroom was light, Helen, who had just turned ten, climbed down off the top bunk. She gave her thirteen-year-old sister, Pammy, who slept on the bottom, a nudge. “Wake up,” Helen whispered urgently.

Pammy rubbed her eyes and yawned. “What time is it?”

“Who cares?” said Helen, stripping off her pajamas. “The sun’s out.”

Pammy lifted her head and shoulders off the mattress to look out the window. “Barely, Helen. The sun is barely out. It’s dawn.”

“Let’s go crabbing,” said Helen, still naked. She had the body of a recent graduate of fourth grade, nipples flat on her chest, a slightly protruding stomach, hairless underarms and crotch. She crossed the room and reached into their shared bureau for clean underwear, then grabbed yesterday’s shirt and shorts from the floor. She was dressed in a flash.

“You’re crazy.”

“Come on, Pammy. If we go now, the crabs will still be sleeping. We’ll get millions of them.”

“You go,” said Pammy, lowering her head back onto the pillow. “I’ll come soon.”

Helen put her hands on her nonexistent hips. “You’re going back to sleep. I can tell.”

“Just for a few minutes. Then I’ll meet you at the docks.” Pammy flipped onto her back.

“You’ll miss all the fun, Pammy.”

“I’ll have fun later,” said Pammy, sleep in her voice.

“Promise you’ll come?”

“I promise. I’ll meet you at the docks in”—Pammy squinted at her Timex watch—“twenty minutes.”

Doubtful but fleetingly satisfied, Helen left the bedroom, tiptoed down the hallway and then descended the stairs, carefully avoiding the fifth one from the top, which creaked. She walked quietly through the living room and onto the screened-in porch. She had her hand on the screen door when she heard her mother, another early riser, call from the kitchen. “Helen, is that you?” Helen didn’t answer. She didn’t want orange juice. She didn’t want cereal. She didn’t want to be quizzed about her tennis match with Amanda the day before. Her mother cared who won these friendly, casual games much more than Helen did. Helen hesitated for just a moment, and then she opened the porch door and launched herself out into the day. “Helen?”

Claire heard the door slam and shook her head. Day after summer day her youngest daughter rose with the birds and bolted out into the world without breakfast or as little as a morning greeting. She was a go-getter, her Helen, with energy and drive that would serve her well in life. Claire took the last sip of coffee from her mug and returned to her grocery list. A moment later, she glanced out the kitchen window to watch Helen, with a plastic cleaning bucket containing crabbing line held tightly in her right hand, run barefoot down the road to the docks.

 

Helen veered off the road at the Tetreau property, carrying her bucket through the itchy beach grass on her way to the breakwater that protected the docks from storm waves and strong currents. It was low tide, as she already knew, so it would be easy to find the mussels she used as bait. They attached themselves, often in clusters, to the granite rocks that had been hauled out of the now-abandoned quarry in town. Within a minute, Helen had two dozen of them in her bucket. On her way back, Helen waded into the water to find a good smashing rock and to feed the whale. The whale was actually a large rock protruding out of the water. It was split right where a real whale’s mouth would be, and Helen routinely fed it, as if it were a living, breathing mammal. On this day, she dumped a half dozen mussels into its mouth, patted its head, and then began her search for the right rock, which, once spotted, she retrieved and put into the bucket alongside the mussels and her line. She ran back to the road and then across the strip of grass that separated it from the first dock. Once she reached the dewy, wide pine planks, Helen slowed to a walk. Her stubbed left big toe, which she had caught on an uneven plank the other day, was still healing. At this leisurely pace Helen was able to listen, for the first time that morning, to the sounds of the shoreline, the water lapping against the dock pilings, the seagulls calling to each other. In her haste to get to her work, to catch as many crabs as she could, she often missed these pleasant reminders of where she was and what she was doing. Helen made a mental note to be more mindful of her surroundings, something her father told them was important to the enjoyment of life. She reached out to touch the pilings with her free hand as she passed them, counting them and the boats and noticing the empty slips that were usually occupied by whalers owned by the Wallaces, Smiths, and Johansons. They were out fishing, the teenage sons with their fathers. Helen had heard and seen them walking down the street past her house when it was still dark, fishing gear in hand, talking in hushed voices that carried up to her bedroom window anyway.

When she reached the end of the dock, Helen lay down on her stomach and peered into the clear water. At first, she saw nothing but a fish head, some green seaweed, and the submerged Coke can she had noticed the day before. But slowly, as her eyes adjusted to the slight ripple on the surface, she could see the crabs on and around the fish head. Some ate voraciously, one bite after another, while others were more cautious, taking a piece of meat and then scurrying off the head and into the relative safety of a nearby clump of eel grass. Prey assessed, Helen transferred the mussels, the smashing rock, and her crabbing line from her bucket to the dock. She gingerly descended the rickety dock ladder to fill her bucket with water. Safely back on the dock, she set the half-filled bucket down, smashed a lone mussel and then pulled away the bits of blue-black shell to expose the orange flesh the crabs adored. Meticulously, she tied the fractured mussel onto the end of her crabbing string, and then dropped it into the water, where it slowly sank to the bottom. Within five seconds, a large fiddler crab was upon it, eating heartily. Ever so gently, Helen inched the mussel and its hungry companion to the surface. In the air and halfway to the confines of Helen’s blue plastic prison, the crab suddenly let go of the bait and dropped with a plop back into the water. “Rats!” she said.

Determined to lure that very crab back, to best him as her mother would say, Helen re-baited her line and threw it into the seaweed where her prey had scampered. In an instant, the same crab crept toward the mussel cautiously. Hearing the hum of a distant engine, Helen glanced up and saw a boat rounding the breakwater and approaching the docks. She waved as it slowed down, in observance of the five-mile-per-hour no-wake zone, to glide into a slip at the other dock. She recognized the men, not by name, but she had seen them many times before. They lived up in the Heights, like most of the boat owners at the second dock. Their dock was newer and easily accessible by cars, which the Heights residents parked along a sandy, unpaved section of the road that wound through the Little Crescent Beach community and ended at their dock. They didn’t linger, the Heights residents, in Helen’s neighborhood. They had their own swimming area, their own dock, their own way of doing things. Many of them lived at the beach throughout the year in neat, well-kept ranch houses, which Helen had observed just once on a long bike ride. When she had asked her older brother, Thomas, about the Heights people when she returned from her ride, he cautioned her to stay away. There were wolves that roamed the wooded areas adjacent to the streets, hungry wolves. And even though Thomas was always kidding around about stuff like that, Helen had never ventured back. From the tracks, when she watched trains, she could see the Heights houses and their occupants, sitting in screened-in porches, gardening, mowing the lawn, doing all the things everyone at her beach did. But mingling with the people who lived on the other side of the tracks was tacitly discouraged. They were winter people, and the Thompsons and their immediate neighbors were summer folk.

Helen looked back down at her bait, which now hosted two crabs, and reached for her bucket. She drew up the line, faster this time, knowing she could lose one, but might keep the other. Out of the water, both crabs continued to snack, seemingly oblivious to their new, drier environment. Helen lowered them into the bucket and gave the line a quick shake, dislodging the crabs from the mussel. Helen watched them as she untied the mussel and tossed it into the bucket. She always gave her guests a meal.

 

“Hey!” called Pammy, as she walked down the dock an hour later. Helen, in the middle of tying another mussel onto her line, looked up at her sister. “I know,” Pammy said as soon as she reached Helen. “I slept longer than twenty minutes. You know me.”

“Yes, I do,” said Helen, focused on her work. “The snooze queen.”

Pammy walked past her sister and peered over the edge of the dock at the fish head. Fish, dead or alive, reminded her of the Johanson brothers, especially Michael, who was seventeen, blond, and at least six feet tall. He talked to her on the beach sometimes and laughed at her jokes. Once, he smacked at a horsefly that had landed on her back, but he missed it. Pammy liked to think that there had been no horsefly, that he simply wanted to touch her back with his big hands that were rough from yard work and tanned from the summer sun. She pretended she was his girlfriend, instead of big-breasted Tammy Jennings, who lived down the street; Tammy had acknowledged Pammy just once in the last two summers, when she needed to know what time it was. Pammy looked down at her own chest, hoping the padding from the training bra made it look like she had something. That spring, she had pleaded with her mother to replace her undershirts with training bras, insisting that all the thirteen-year-olds wore them.
I don’t care what other thirteen-year-olds are doing,
her mother had said, warning Pammy about the pitfalls of peer pressure. But Claire had nonetheless acquiesced and taken Pammy to Bell’s Department Store, where they bought a package of three lacy bras, one each in pink, white, and yellow.

“Get the bucket!” shouted Helen. “I got another one!” Pammy brought the bucket to Helen, who lifted the exposed mussel and the small crab that was tearing away at it out of the water. “Slip it underneath, Pammy! I’m going to lose it!” Pammy held the bucket under the crab, which Helen gently shook until it dropped in with the others. Twelve, no thirteen crabs, Pammy counted. She smiled at Helen, who diligently tied another mussel onto her line.

“Keep this up, Helen, and you may get a hundred.”

“They’re really biting today, Pammy. Do you want some of my string? You can catch them with me. We may need another bucket, though.”

“I think I’ll just watch you.” Pammy sat down on the dock, her back against a piling, and tilted her face toward the sun. She closed her eyes and listened to Helen drop her line back into the water.

“You’re not watching, Pammy. You’re sleeping again.”

“I’m imagining. I’m imagining you’re catching a crab right now. Look at your line.”

“There’s nothing there,” said Helen, peering down through the seaweed at her unoccupied mussel.

“Look again, Helen.”

“Hey,” said Helen, “here comes your boyfriend.” Pammy opened her eyes and shielded them from the sun. In the distance, she saw the Johansons’ boat, speeding toward the dock. Pammy ran her fingers through her hair, then tucked her shirt into her shorts. “You’ve got some toothpaste on your cheek,” said Helen, teasing her sister.

“I do not.”

“I’m so glad I don’t like boys yet,” said Helen, looking again into the water. “Charlotte says it will happen any day now.” Charlotte, their seventeen-year-old sister, knew everything about boys.

“Charlotte’s right,” said Pammy, retying the loose laces of one of her Keds sneakers.

“It’s too much trouble,” said Helen, pulling up her line. The large crab that had been circling her bait suddenly snatched it when she wasn’t looking. This time, Helen decided to wrap the line around twice.

“It’s no trouble,” Pammy said, “especially when Tammy Jennings is still in bed asleep. This crabbing idea has its merits, Helen.”

The Johansons backed their boat into the slip, then cut the engine. Pammy waved enthusiastically and walked down the dock to meet them. Dr. Johanson, an orthopedic surgeon, said good morning to Pammy, calling her Miss Thompson as he always did because he didn’t know her first name, and then, addressing his sons, told them he’d see them back at the house. After he left, Pammy, Michael, and his younger brother William, the boys with three large bluefish in their hands, walked back toward Helen. “Hey, Helen,” said Michael. “Catch anything?”

“A few,” Helen replied, not looking up from her task.

“Pammy tells me you have thirteen. That’s not bad. But if I remember correctly, you had sixteen by this time yesterday.”

“That’s because Pammy stayed in bed yesterday,” said Helen, looking up at her sister and smiling.

“I did not,” Pammy retorted. “I got up early and went to the store with Mom.”

“Anyway, I had no distractions,” said Helen, using a word she had heard her mother use to describe Charlotte’s boyfriends.

“It’s a wonder I can catch anything then,” said Michael, turning to leave. “I’ve got more distractions than I can handle.” At that, Michael and William let out loud, quick laughs. Pammy laughed too, more for encouragement for the boys than as an indication of her comprehension. And then the boys were gone, walking briskly to join their father who was walking along the same road Helen traveled to reach the dock. Poles in hand, the doctor seemed to be in no hurry. As soon as the boys caught up with him, however, he quickened his pace, eager perhaps for the bacon and egg breakfast waiting for them at home. Every morning Mrs. Johanson cooked a tummy-filling breakfast for her men. Plus, she was the prettiest and nicest mother in the neighborhood. Helen had once been invited in for French toast, which Mrs. Johanson made with a real baguette. When Helen had shared this tip with her mother, Claire had agreed to try it. But she never did, instead favoring the thin slices of white her husband loved with syrup and powdered sugar on Saturday mornings.