Bittersweet (19 page)

Out of nowhere she yelped, cutting herself off and stopping short on the path. I nearly tripped over her. As the seconds passed, my emotions ran the gamut, from irritated—I couldn’t see around her—to concerned—she doubled over, and I thought she might be sick—to confused—as she exclaimed, “Oh no, oh no, May.” When she began to cry, I stepped off the precarious path and looked around her.

There, in front of her, lay the carcass of a turtle. It was big—its shell a foot in diameter. In death, it lay belly up, its four legs blackened and splayed, hardened like cured leather. Sharp-looking claws curled into the air from its toes, as though the beast had died fighting. Its head was gone.

“Oh my god,” Lu gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. A smell had begun to settle over us—rotting, salty—and I feared she would be sick, for then I would be too. I grabbed her by the waist and pulled her forward, around the dead creature. She ogled as we
stepped over it, gagging. All we had to do was get to the end of the point and reassess. Animals died all the time.

As we made our way down the path, a strange sound settled in my ears. The loud, communal thrum was made by nature, but I had never heard anything like it. I led Lu toward the rocky point. It wasn’t until the tree cover ended that my knees went weak and I felt myself swoon. I tried to turn Lu around before she saw, but it was no use. The girl let out a sobbing cry, and nauseous sorrow came over her as she took in the gruesome scene—a dozen turtles, or more, each in the same rigor mortis as the first, covered by a swarm of hungry, angry flies and squirming with maggots. The dead bodies were in various states of decay. A few were half eaten. Lu retched into a blueberry bush, but nothing came up. I took her hand and led her back the way we came. The whole terrible world seemed to be buzzing.

B
y the time we got back to camp, Lu was reasonable—there was no one to call now that it was past business hours, but first thing in the morning she’d go to the Dining Hall and phone the university. There had to be someone studying turtles.

“It’s global warming,” she cried, her eyes rimmed with red.

“Didn’t everyone say it was a very cold winter?” I asked. “Maybe the water was frozen solid. Maybe they couldn’t get back in.” She shook her head and started crying all over again.

I braced myself when I heard the car motor. Eric? John? Galway? But it was Tilde’s white Jaguar, and soon Ev was upon us, arms laden with shopping bags. I was surprised by how hardened my heart felt when she stepped through the door, as I remembered how she’d lied about the inspection. Still, I was ready for reinforcements. She’d comfort Lu, pull her into bed, hold her until she slept.

But instead, she loomed over us, sneering. “What’s that smell?” To Lu she growled, “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Hot, new tears sprang to Lu’s eyes as the girl wordlessly rose and left the cottage, the screen door slamming behind her. Ev balked. “What’s wrong with her?”

“How was your trip?” I mustered.

“My mother has such wretched taste,” she complained, tossing a
bag at me. “I bought you a sweater.” And with that, she bolted herself in the bedroom.

I locked myself in the bathroom. The single lightbulb cast the roughly hewed pine boards that lined floor, walls, and ceiling in a dreamy red glow. Out the eyebrow window, the night sky faded to a deep purple. I ran myself a piping hot bath in the claw-foot tub, filling the room with the scent of sulfur—the hard water had to come all the way up from a well three hundred feet below. I was grateful to be immersed in a smell other than that of rotting turtle, no matter how strong or unpleasant.

Bath run, remembering Indo’s warning (“Trust no one”), I felt for the book in its hiding place below the sink, half expecting it to be stolen. But it was right where I had left it, wrapped in its old towel. I didn’t dare sit in the tub for fear of dropping the precious book in; instead I settled onto the brand-new violet bath mat Ev had spent far too much on.

The book was small—both covers only a little larger than my hands bookending it in prayer. The musty smell I’d first caught a whiff of when Indo placed it into my hands still lingered. The binding sighed a brittle complaint when I opened it. The paper was of heavier stock than used nowadays, its edges beveled.

The blank pages had been used to make a journal, filled with sloping cursive in the same black ink, from one cover to the other. I deduced it was a woman’s handwriting even before I found the name inside the front cover: Katrine Spiegel Winslow. My mind worked on the family tree, recalling what I could from memory. This was Kitty. Bard’s wife; Birch and Indo’s mother.

“Thursday, January 2,” the first entry read, “a lovely New Year’s present from B. to record our life together. He is back in Boston already for a fortnight. Easy to miss Mutti and Papa and Friedrich
when the snow is falling. I felt sure B. and I were expanding our own little family, but the holiday brought unhappy news. Thankful for B.’s optimism and Pippa’s company. The sister I never had. She comes to tea daily with tales of the world’s misfortune. Is it terrible to take solace in finding oneself better off than the huddled masses?”

Kitty’s voice seemed to fill the small wooden bathroom. I pored over the entry, trying to deduce the year. She might still be childless (“I felt sure B. and I were expanding our own little family”) or she might have only one or two children, which, I supposed, could still be considered a “little” family. So she might have started the journal anytime before her first baby, little Greta, was born, through the birth of her second child, Indo, in 1937.

I took the Pippa mentioned in the journal to be the old woman who had cradled my face—she had been young, and even more beautiful, whenever this was written. I thought back to the family tree I’d found with Galway—Gammy Pippa was Bard’s sister. So I took the “B.” in Kitty’s entry to be her husband, Bard, making Pippa Kitty’s sister-in-law.

I thought of my own family—one, two, three—at Kitty’s mention of her parents and, presumably, her brother. I wondered what had brought Kitty so far from home.

I looked back through the entry for clues of when it had been written. Birch was easily in his seventies—vigorous, but aging—and given that his sisters Greta and Indo were older than he, that meant Greta had probably been born in the early to midthirties. I thought giddily of the money that had saved the Winslows from certain ruin as early as 1934—if I was correct about Greta’s age, and that “our own little family” might just have meant a childless Kitty and Bard, then that money could have come in right around the time Kitty started this journal.

Another way to age the entry was the mention of the “world’s
misfortune.” The Great Depression had already struck, or was striking. Which meant she had probably written this after Black Tuesday, in October 1929—I’d gotten an A in Modern American History.

“Can I come in?” Ev asked from the other side of the wooden door, startling me.

“Ummmm,” I hedged, frantically wrapping the diary inside the towel, shoving it back into the cabinet.

“Are you pooping or something?”

“Just a second,” I called, ripping my clothes off and hopping toward the door. I slid open the lock and vaulted toward the bathtub, pulling the shower curtain around me. “Okay,” I called out, plopping myself down into the water, wetting my arms.

Ev opened the door. “What’s the bath mat doing over by the sink?” I heard her tromp over and sit on the closed toilet. “Why is the curtain closed?”

Because you called me a lesbian, I thought. Because I don’t want to see you right now. Because you lied to me.

She peeked her head around the curtain. I could feel her eyes wandering over my naked flesh. “Wow,” she said after a minute. “You look fantastic!”

I frowned.

“Your arms are totally toned. And you’re all tan. You look really … strong.”

I tried not to let her compliments work on me. But I looked down at myself and realized she was right. I did look good.

“I missed you,” she said.

I didn’t reply.

Ev spent the next day firmly by my side. I’d planned to slip down to my favorite waterfront spot for a few hours alone with Kitty’s journal, but Friday promised gray, beginning with a constant drizzle that rendered our summer quarters cold and close. I was concerned about
Lu, and thought of heading over to Trillium to check in on her, but Ev wouldn’t let me out of her sight (“Let’s bake cookies!” “Let’s pick a color for the trim!”). She wanted to take me for a wet hike down to Bead Beach (“The clay from the lake gets washed up on the reeds and dries and makes these amazing little beads—oh, you’ll love it!”) or on a rainy, long row (“Have you seen the view from Honeymoon Cove?”), but I feigned illness from the couch, hoping she’d let me retreat to bed while she headed out for better company. She stayed put, wheedling me with a constant happy mood I found disconcerting. I wondered bitterly what John was busy doing that made her crave my company.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked when I made a face at the grilled cheese sandwich she’d made me.

Birch had told me not to say a word. And hadn’t she been so nice ever since she got home?

I took a bite of the sandwich. It wasn’t half bad. “I guess it just hurt my feelings you didn’t tell me you were going to Montreal beforehand.” As I said the words, I believed they described everything that was bothering me. I was hurt to know she could so easily leave me behind, simple as that.

She wrapped her arms around me. “I know, sweet girl. Mum basically kidnapped me. At least I left a note, right?”

It was easy as that to forgive her.

It’s sad and beautiful how a few hours can come to stand for the many others that never were. One looks back and holds up a handful of hours to prove, “That was what it was, it was so perfect,” in spite of what one knows, in spite of all the other days that came before and after. In the intervening years, I’ve found myself awake in the wee hours, remembering the simple pleasure of that evening with Ev as I finally allowed myself to embrace it. Had the rest of the summer been uneventful, full of nights like it, I would have forgotten all we did—how she taught me her six favorite summer camp songs, and
snorted unabashedly when laughing at my second-grade Mayflower joke. How we hauled up the bag of magazines I’d saved and, together, made collages for each of the Winslow family units—tidy for Athol’s, messy for Banning’s, hippy-dippy for the Kitterings—until we’d made a dozen to line our bathroom walls. We ate spaghetti sauce, hard-boiled eggs, and white rice for dinner. We made hot chocolate with little marshmallows. We listened to Sinatra and, when the music ended, rejoiced in the fact that the rain had stopped, and listened to the distant strains of “La Vie en Rose” amplified off the water—someone, somewhere, was playing Edith Piaf.

I had thrown around the term
postlapsarian
in preparation for my Milton seminar, because it made me sound like an expert. The truth is, I had no idea what the word meant, not really. Sure, I knew that before Adam and Eve ate of the apple, they knew no sorrow. I knew that they lapsed by eating from that tree. I knew that God kicked them out of Paradise because of it. And that the rest of us came after that, prohibited from Eden.

Post (after). Lapsarian (the lapse).

We live in the world with sorrow in it, the world that Adam and Eve created the moment they tasted that apple. Each of us humans has a moment—if not many—in which we lapse. For some, the transgression involves sex. For others, simply, doubt or a rage so all encompassing, it impels us to make irreversible decisions.

But whatever the transgression is doesn’t really matter. What matters is that lapsing is our fate. We humans are doomed to it. Worse, it is our destiny to look back longingly, with nostalgia, at our world before we changed, at who we were Before.

We can never forget.

But we can never go back.

I remember that night with Ev, just the two of us, just happy. I remember because it was our last.

I
opened my eyes the next morning to the pocking sound of tennis balls. It was sunny once again, but my heart sank as I remembered it was the weekend. Galway would come, or he would not. I would ask him about the woman, or I would not. He would remember he had kissed me, or he would not. It occurred to me that this was why I had been so desperate to bury myself in Kitty’s narrative; I didn’t want to face my own life.

Ev rolled over in bed and rubbed her bleary eyes. “What’s wrong?”

I shook my head and offered a smile.

She fumbled for my copy of
Paradise Lost
on our shared night table. “ ‘Awake, / My fairest, my espoused, my latest found,’ ” she read in a croaky voice, “ ‘Heav’n’s last best gift, my ever-new delight, / Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field / Calls us.’ ”

I heard the soft scratch of paper feathering out of the book. “What’s this?” she asked.

The letters to my mother. I sat bolt upright. “Those are private,” I growled, grasping for the pieces of paper as I launched from my bed.

“Jesus,” she said, hands darting from my reach.

My mind was racing—what had I said about her in those letters? Had she seen her name? I’d have to find a better hiding place.

I held my hand out. “Can I have them?”

She relinquished them reluctantly, then sighed. “We need to get out of here.”

She was right—it probably wasn’t healthy to spend the day waiting for Galway to stroll up the lane. She tossed me my jeans. Next thing I knew, we were dressed and Abby was barking at us from John’s pickup, idling outside our door.

It didn’t occur to me I’d be the third wheel until we were already barreling past the Dining Hall in John’s Ford. The two aging couples playing in their tennis whites watched us pass, their faces and rackets turning toward us as though they were sunflowers and we the sun. Ev and John gave them nothing to gossip about—they neither touched nor spoke—although I suspected none of that was necessary to start a Winloch rumor. I turned to look out my open window as we passed Galway’s vacant cottage. My heart sunk a little further and stuck in something angry as Quicksilver darted out from behind Queen Anne’s Lace and raced beside us for a stretch, his mouth holding something helpless and squirming.