Before You Know Kindness (13 page)

For the past hour, since the teens had started to congregate with their cans of soda (and, so far, no one was drinking anything stronger than soda), Willow and Charlotte had been looked after largely by Gwen—the lifeguard who was teaching them how to dive. It had crossed Willow’s mind that either her parents or her aunt and uncle had probably asked the young woman to keep an eye on the two of them, but she wasn’t sure. It might just have been that Gwen had taken pity on them: Charlotte was at least two years younger than everyone else, and Willow was four. Gwen wasn’t with them every moment, but periodically she would wander by to see how they were and hand them some marshmallows or point an open bag of popcorn in their direction. A couple of times other teenagers had come with her, but they always seemed to view Willow and Charlotte as small, pleasant animals that could be stroked briefly and abstractedly and then left once more to their own devices.

As the evening progressed it seemed to Willow that Charlotte’s biggest disappointment wasn’t that she was younger than the rest of the crowd. After all, she had expected this. Rather, it was that Gary, the lifeguard on whom it was obvious to anyone who cared to notice such things she had a serious crush, was actually hanging around with the grown-ups back at the clubhouse. Here Charlotte was with the teenagers at the bonfire, and the teenager she was most interested in had chosen to be with the adults. Worse, when they had first started down the hill with Gwen to the site of the great mound of long dead limbs and dying tree branches, Gary had been chatting with Aunt Catherine. The two of them were on the terrace with those old-fashioned highball glasses in their hands, and they were talking like they were old friends.

Charlotte had been furious. Furious and confused. Why would Gary want to be with the adults when he could be with normal people his own age? she had asked Willow and Gwen rhetorically as they wandered across the fairway. Where was her father? she had wondered, as if there was something inappropriate about her mother chatting with the lifeguard.

Willow had expected that her own parents would leave early with Patrick and Grandmother, but they hadn’t. Patrick had fallen asleep a little after seven in a corner of the clubhouse in his canvas baby seat, and her mom had decided it was best to let him rest. Normally her mom didn’t seem to like the crowd at the Contour Club—at least not the way her dad and her aunt and uncle did—but she seemed to be having a pretty good time tonight.

Someone had brought a portable CD player to the bonfire, and a few of the older girls were trying to convince a couple of the boys to dance. When Charlotte realized that Gwen was leaving them once again—when she saw the girl put an arm casually around Connor Fitzhugh’s shoulders and then start to move him around like an immensely supple marionette—she sat down in the grass and pulled Willow down with her. Connor, though younger than Gwen, was handsome and athletic and the very same lad whom Charlotte had implied at breakfast had suggested that the two girls come to the bonfire in the first place. So far he hadn’t said a word to either of them.

“In my school in New York, by now someone would have gotten the party going with a little beer,” Charlotte murmured, and her voice was dripping with condescension.

“The party seems to be going just fine . . . if you’re fifteen,” she answered, and immediately she regretted what she had said. It had sounded clever to her in her mind, but when she saw Charlotte look down at the grass between her legs and start ripping at the small strands as if they were weeds in the vegetable garden, she realized it had only been hurtful.

She wondered briefly why Charlotte hated being twelve so much, why she desired so madly to be older. “You know,” she went on, “we don’t have to stay.”

“You can go any time you want,” Charlotte said.

“I know.”

Connor was moving a bit on his own now, and sometimes he was holding Gwen’s hands as they danced and sometimes there was a wide corridor of air between them. Gwen was wearing a sweatshirt and baggy shorts, and she didn’t look nearly as heavy as she did in only a bathing suit.

Behind them they heard a small group of boys arriving, three of them with baseball caps on backward, and they were laughing a little too loudly. When the boys got closer to the circle Willow saw why: They were holding open bottles of beer in their hands, and two of them had cases of beer under their arms. They put the cases down on the grass—one of the boys nearly dropped his, which caused everyone around them to laugh even more boisterously since those beers would now erupt like geysers when they were opened—and the teenagers descended on the cartons as if they were burlap sacks of grain at a refugee camp. A moment later the crowd dispersed and the music began to seem strident and angry to Willow.

Beside her Charlotte stood. She watched her cousin brush the grass off the back of her shorts and then stroll casually over to the ransacked cardboard cartons. There she bent over, pawed briefly among the bent and torn flaps—and among something near the cartons as well, a bag or a large purse of some kind—and then seemed to find amid the pillaged boxes what she was searching for: two bottles of beer that had been overlooked when the hordes had started seizing the alcohol. She glanced briefly, nervously, around to see if any of the teenagers cared that she was procuring a little beer, but no one was taking any interest in her.

When she returned to her spot in the grass beside Willow, she smiled knowingly and offered her one of the bottles.

“No, thanks,” Willow said.

“Suit yourself.”

“You’re not really going to drink that, are you?”

“What do you think, I just got it for show?”

As a matter of fact, I do,
Willow thought, but she kept her mouth shut this time. She didn’t want to challenge her cousin, to dare her in essence into consuming the whole bottle. Perhaps Charlotte’s big plan was simply to hold the bottle in her hands, either so she could feel older or so that one of the teenagers would see her with the beer and start paying her some attention. A lot of what Charlotte did, in Willow’s opinion, was about getting people to pay attention to her.

“No, I didn’t think that,” she said simply.

Still, Charlotte unscrewed the top and took a small sip and then, after pausing for just the briefest moment with the lip of the bottle at the edge of her mouth, she took a second one. Willow realized that as bad as the beer probably tasted, Charlotte planned at the very least to polish off that first bottle—and maybe, if the opportunity presented itself, that second one, too. She didn’t think that was a good idea at all, and so she reached over for the unopened bottle in the grass between Charlotte’s legs and said, “Here. Let me have that one.”

It was more difficult to unscrew the lid than she had expected—she saw in the light from the bonfire that she had given herself a sliver of a cut on the inside of her thumb, and a little blood was just starting to puddle in the small split in the skin—but the beer didn’t taste quite as horrible as it smelled. She told herself that it would be better for everyone if she drank one bottle than if her cousin drank two.

“You like it, don’t you?” Charlotte asked.

She shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“Only okay. Yeah, right. I got something else, too.”

“Food?” Willow asked hopefully. “I’m starved.”

“Better than food,” she said, and then she told Willow about stumbling just now across the canvas bag beside the cartons of beer in the grass. It was Gwen’s bag—the small sack the high school student carried around with her like a purse—and it was on its side on the ground, the contents spilling haphazardly out onto the manicured fairway lawn: A lipstick, Gwen’s bathing suit, a small can of lavender-scented aerosol body spray. A disposable lighter. Tampax. A plastic Ziploc bag with loose flakes of marijuana and three thick, tightly rolled joints. Charlotte said that she had set the large canvas bag upright, and carefully put everything back inside it except for one of the joints. Now she cradled the dope in her hand like a rolled hundred-dollar bill.

“I can’t believe Gwen would do drugs,” Willow murmured, at once appalled and entranced. She had never before seen an actual joint. Certainly she had seen images in health class and on antidrug commercials on TV, but never before had she glimpsed an honest-to-God spliff up close and personal.

“It’s not drugs,” Charlotte said, correcting her. “It’s just marijuana. Cancer patients and people with AIDS smoke it all the time. And, if you want, we can, too.”

“Charlotte!”

Her cousin mimicked her, repeating her name in the singsong voice of a little girl crybaby: “Charrrrrrrr-lotte!”

“Come on . . . don’t be like that.”

“Gwen had three of them. She won’t miss one. It’s okay.”

Charlotte patted the pockets of her shirt and her shorts, and Willow wondered what she was looking for. Then, without saying a word, the girl stood up again and walked casually back to Gwen’s canvas bag. She reached in, and Willow presumed she was taking a second (or even a third) joint, but then she understood that her cousin was swiping—
borrowing,
she imagined Charlotte would say—the teenager’s matches or lighter.

When she returned, Willow saw that the girl had indeed brought back a lime-colored Bic, and she was flicking the striker with her thumb. She considered teasing Charlotte about that ridiculous bit of pantomime she had performed a moment earlier: patting herself down like she actually expected to find a lighter of her own in her pockets. But she restrained herself, and then she found herself watching enrapt as Charlotte proceeded to light the joint. She inhaled, hacked loudly and powerfully, rasped . . . and then inhaled again. This time she didn’t cough, and then slowly she exhaled. The smell was sweet, vaguely reminiscent of both blueberries and an exotic herb she had once smelled at an Indian restaurant. She liked it, and when her cousin turned toward her and raised her eyebrows invitingly, she accepted the joint and took a drag, too. Then she took another. And there in the grass the two girls proceeded to smoke and sniff and rasp until the burning paper scorched the tips of Charlotte’s fingers, and she dropped it onto the ground as if it were a wooden match that almost had consumed itself.

Ten

N
an Seton wanted desperately to glance at her watch, but she knew if she did this nice but dull Martin and Cecilia Dallmally from Scotland would presume she was either tired or bored (or both). Still, like an itch the desire to know whether it was nine or nine fifteen was growing insufferable. Finally, just when she thought she was going to have to pull back the straw-colored linen on her wrist to look at her watch and make some pretext to leave, she felt a small breeze on her neck. When she turned toward the terrace door, she saw Charlotte and Willow approaching. For a brief second they looked a tad unsteady on their feet—Charlotte seemed to be touching every table and chair within arm’s reach as she navigated her way through the crowded clubhouse—but Nan couldn’t imagine why that would be and decided her eyes had played a small trick on her.

“Oh, look,” she said to the Dallmallys, “there are my granddaughters now. Will you excuse me?”

“They’re adorable! You’ll have to introduce us,” Cecilia cooed.

“Oh, sometime, certainly,” she murmured, pulling away from the couple like a sailboat that has at last snared the wind. She put a hand on each of her granddaughters’ shoulders and was pleasantly surprised to find the girls smiling up at her.

“I’ll bet you want us to meet some more people, don’t you, Grandmother?” Charlotte said, her words giddy and playful. Given the rare and uncharacteristic good cheer that filled the child’s voice, her eyes were not as wide as Nan would have expected. But she was so pleased to see Charlotte in such fine spirits that she didn’t think anything of it, and she concluded that if she weren’t already so anxious to get home she actually might have chosen this moment to show off her granddaughters some more.

“I always want you to meet people,” she answered. “And you were both so charming earlier. But we’re through for tonight. It’s late.”

“It sure is,” Willow agreed, nodding, and then she giggled as if she found something funny in the fact it was after nine.

“Let’s find your parents—”

“There’s Mom,” Willow said, the words a chipper little cry, and she pointed at Sara as her mother was lifting Patrick from his canvas chair, the baby’s head swaying on his shoulders as if it were a poorly attached pumpkin on a scarecrow. John was beside her, gathering into his arms the diaper bag with its bottles and lotions and wipes.

Nan nodded and felt a surge of relief at the idea that—almost miraculously—everybody was preparing to go home at exactly the same moment, and that moment was now: Her granddaughters had returned as happy as could be from the bonfire, and her daughter-in-law and her son were collecting little Patrick and his accessories. Any minute now she would spy Catherine and Spencer, and they all would be off.

“I don’t see my mom,” Charlotte said, craning her neck.

“I saw her a few minutes ago,” Nan said. “She was talking to Gary Winslow.”

“Where was Dad?”

“He’s around, too.”

“Was
he
talking to Gary?”

“I don’t recall who he was talking to, Charlotte. Now, do you have your shoes? Where
are
your shoes?” She had happened to look down and saw that Charlotte’s feet were bare.

“Oh, yeah. My sneak-sneaks.”

“Your what?”

“My—oh, don’t worry, Grandmother, I know right where they are,” she said, and suddenly she and Willow were almost doubled over in laughter.

“Well, I don’t see what’s funny about misplacing your sneakers. Go get them so we can go home. Shoo, now!”

“They’re . . . they’re . . .”

“They’re down by the golf course, I suppose? At the bonfire?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. Willow, why don’t you go help your parents with Patrick? Tell them Charlotte and I are just getting her sneakers.”

“But call them sneak-sneaks!” Charlotte called after her cousin, and once again the children succumbed to a burst of hilarity at the word.

She took Charlotte’s hand and led the girl through the crowd. Her granddaughter was unusually pliant, and Nan attributed this to the lateness of the hour and the idea that the child had apparently had a nice time with the teenagers. The older children had not let her down: They’d taken good care of her granddaughters.

There were people on the terrace and the soft grass surrounding the practice green, and the tiki torches were sending small plumes of jet black smoke into the sky. Here she could hear the music from the clubroom, something slightly jazzy, as well as the rock music from the bonfire down the hill. As she and Charlotte approached the teenagers she thought she smelled something sweet and herbal and unfamiliar, and she wondered if the teenagers had thrown pinecones or cloves into the blaze to give it this scent.

“They’re over by those cartons,” Charlotte said, as they stood in the shadows at a short distance. “I see them.”

“Are those beer cartons?”

“Oh, no! Soda. They’re the soda cartons.”

She nodded, though she didn’t believe for a minute those cartons had ever held anything but beer. Still, she wasn’t upset: Certainly John and Catherine had snuck a few surreptitious beers when they had been teenagers, and there were worse places for these teens to drink a beer or two than a bonfire no more than 150 yards from their parents. Generally, these were pretty wholesome kids. She watched some of the girls and boys dance, while others sat in the grass in small groups of three and four. She guessed there were twenty or twenty-five teenagers here. None of them seemed to pay Charlotte much attention as she rounded up her sneakers, and Nan was glad: She didn’t want to delay their departure any longer than necessary. She wanted to return to the clubroom with Charlotte, find Catherine and Spencer, and then head home. Tomorrow was Sunday, and she wanted everyone to get plenty of sleep tonight so they could spend a healthy chunk of the next day swimming at Echo Lake, before returning to the club for some late-afternoon tennis. Activity would be especially important if, as discussed, they all went to Gerta’s Edelweiss Garden for dinner.

“Got my sneak-sneaks,” Charlotte cooed, and she held them high in the air, one in each hand, by their laces.

“Come on, then.”

“I’m come-on-ing.”

It took them a tad longer to climb back up the hill than Nan would have liked because Charlotte seemed to be dawdling—one moment she was lifting her legs in slow motion as if they were cranes and staring down at her knees in rapt fascination, and the next she was stopping still in her tracks to gaze at her fingers—but finally she managed to herd her granddaughter back to the terrace. She sighed, but her relief was short-lived because there she saw Catherine and Gary at the very edge of the terrace. They were not exactly alone, but they were not exactly a part of the festivities, either. They were buffered from the rest of the crowd by the massive stone barbecue Gary’s own grandfather had paid to have built after some other club member had used the sand dune on nearby eighteen for a clambake. The barbecue was at least seven feet tall and that many feet wide, the individual stones the size of lamp shades and basketballs. At first Nan couldn’t imagine why Catherine and Gary had felt the need to carry on their conversation behind the barbecue, but then almost instantly she could. She saw Gary’s free hand, the one not holding his glass, reach behind Catherine’s head, brushing her daughter’s ponytail with his fingers and (surely she had not seen this part correctly) stroking briefly the back of her neck. With the reflexes of a mother bear protecting both a cub and a grand-cub, in one smooth motion Nan moved herself between Charlotte and Catherine so the girl couldn’t see her mother and guided the child forward onto the cold slate of the patio. Then she looked back over her shoulder and called out in a voice that she was confident sounded completely normal, “Catherine, Charlotte and I are rounding up Spencer and heading home.” She thought it was important now to remind Catherine that she had both a daughter and a husband and they both were present at the club.

She listened for a moment, but over the sounds of the music and the conversation and the clinking of ice against glass she heard nothing from either Catherine or Gary.

“Did you see Mom?” Charlotte asked her, and the girl suddenly looked young and small to Nan, almost tiny.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “Here she comes now.” From behind the barbecue they watched Catherine emerge. She was alone, she looked vaguely uncomfortable, and Nan noticed that the glass in her hands was empty. A moment later Nan saw Gary strolling down the hill toward the bonfire, away from the cocktail party, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. If she hadn’t known that he, too, had been behind that massive wall of stones, she would have presumed that he’d materialized out of thin air.

THEY WERE DRIVING HOME
in a caravan of two cars, the minivan that Catherine and Spencer had rented, followed by John and Sara’s navy blue Volvo. Nan was riding with John and Sara, sharing the backseat with baby Patrick, while the girls went ahead in the rental. Nan didn’t mind sharing the backseat with the baby, but he was a tad fussy right now because he smelled like a Dumpster, and it was taking a lot of work to keep him from howling. Still, if she wished she were in the other car it was primarily because she would have liked to have watched her daughter and son-in-law up close to see if there was any tension between them. When they were assembling in the parking lot of the club a few minutes ago, Spencer had wondered aloud whether they’d arrive home and actually witness deer racing away from the yard when their headlights washed over the garden, and with a real edge in her voice Catherine had asked him to let go of the deer—
Get over it,
she had said—and to please move on.

Nevertheless, her distance now from Catherine and Spencer proved calming. Reassuring. By the time they pulled into her driveway, she told herself that she hadn’t witnessed anything inappropriate when she and Charlotte had been returning to the clubhouse from the bonfire. She had seen Catherine talking to a teenager at a cocktail party. Maybe Gary had been swatting at a mosquito near Catherine’s ear or pulling a bug from her hair. There were a million innocent reasons why the two of them might have been standing behind a barbecue rather than, say, by the glass doors or the tiki torches or—along with almost all of the other adults who were outside at that moment—near the long tables with the finger foods and the booze. For all she knew, Gary was regaling Catherine with stories about how her daughter had been spending her days at the club. What a dolphin the child had become in the pool. How nicely she dove.

The cars arrived back home together, and while John and Sara took the baby upstairs she watched her granddaughters and Catherine and Spencer climb from their vehicle. She noticed that the two girls still seemed to be giggling, and they were strolling to the edge of the garden with Spencer. Catherine walked past her to the front door of the house, moving, Nan observed, with her head down as if she were an embarrassed teenager. She recalled the time Catherine had been fifteen years old, and she and some summer fling had managed to fog up the windows in Catherine’s bedroom upstairs. It had been a chilly, rainy August afternoon and they had closed the windows against the cold. When Nan had gone upstairs to tell the young man it was time to go home, she discovered that he and Catherine had been petting with such vigor that the glass panes looked like a shower stall. Catherine had the same guilty expression on her face now.

After she heard the screen door swing shut, she joined Spencer and the girls at the perimeter of the garden. Even in the moonlight, they couldn’t see much. They could distinguish the corn plants that Spencer had returned to their upright positions, gently showering the roots with clay and dirt, and they could make out the potato hills. They could see the twine that had been stretched like tightropes over the rows of carrots and the stakes that were nearest them. But that was about it.

Spencer sighed so loudly that Nan and the girls heard him, and then mumbled something about a short walk.

“Dad is really bummed out, isn’t he?” Charlotte said, once he had started off into the night.

“Yes, he is,” Nan said. “But he’ll get over it.” She hadn’t meant to sound unsympathetic, but she could tell by the way her granddaughter was looking at her—her lower lip drooping slightly, her eyebrows raised into a dome—that she had. All she had meant to suggest was that, like most men, her father was overreacting. Men made a big deal about pain and a big deal about disappointment. Then they got over both. At least they did if they had any character, and she knew Spencer certainly had some. He had a temper and that annoying eccentricity about meat, but otherwise he was pretty solid.

“Don’t stay out here too long, girls,” she continued after a moment, when neither Charlotte nor Willow said anything. Charlotte had turned away from her, and—not unlike her father a moment ago—was staring into the dark. It dawned on Nan suddenly that her two children and their spouses were so focused on other things that they had all gone into the house or into the fields without a single word to their daughters: not a word about the evening, not a word about getting ready for bed. John and Sara had raced inside with Patrick, Catherine had gone inside with her tail between her legs, guilty over . . . Nan didn’t know what, but guilty over a desire, a word, perhaps even an act. (No, it hadn’t gone that far, Nan quickly reassured herself.) And Spencer had gone for a walk, unable to think about anything but his distress over this ridiculous garden.

She felt a slight rush of annoyance at all four of them, both for their dereliction of parental duty and for taking her for granted. They were all so absorbed in their own lives that either they hadn’t thought for a moment of their daughters or they had presumed that Grandmother would take care of the pair. Get their teeth brushed, their hair combed. Get them into their nightgowns. Settle them down with their books.

Did they—John and Sara, Catherine and Spencer—have any idea how complicated it was to settle the two girls down at the end of the day? Of course they didn’t. Last night, everyone’s first together in the country, the girls had stayed up till eleven thirty with their parents, showing them what they had learned about bridge, telling them about their nature hikes, and regaling them with their stories of their days at the club. The children (and, Nan reminded herself, they
were
children) had collapsed into their beds, exhausted. It wasn’t usually that easy.