Justin Kramon (2 page)

“But that time I made fun of him?” she said, trying to pull their conversation back to surer ground, a silly story they could both laugh at.

That was the time her dad had yelled at her for feeding Raskal under the table, and from some perverse motivation, when he was done yelling, Finny had said, “Aristotle.” Just that one word, but in a voice that was clearly an imitation of the way Stanley quoted great men.

“What did you say?” Stanley asked.

“Nothing.”

“I heard you.”

“It wasn’t
anything.”

“Don’t mock me, Finny.”

“I don’t mock,” she said, unable to resist the opening. “I steal.”

Stanley’s eyes lit up.
“Get out!”
he screamed, jostling the table so the plates clattered.

On the phone, Sylvan said to Finny, “I’d never seen him so angry before.”

“Me neither,” she said. “To tell the truth, I was a little frightened.”

“I don’t think you were ever frightened, Fin.”

“You’re wrong about that, Syl. I was more frightened than any of you ever knew.”

Finny grew up in northern Maryland, in the area of rolling farmland just west of Interstate 83, just south of the Pennsylvania line. The Shorts’ home sat on a hill, and from the back windows you could see the whole scoop of the valley where they lived: cornfields, clusters of trees, horse pastures, all threaded with fences and gravel driveways, dotted with big manorish houses. It looked to Finny, from her bedroom window, like a huge gaudy quilt. The air outside their house smelled like grass and dirt, honeysuckles in the late spring, horse manure when the farmers were planting. One lap around the block was eleven miles long, by the car’s odometer. (It had been Stanley who’d measured, on a Sunday, with Sylvan in the passenger seat: they’d reported their findings as soon as they’d walked in the door. “Eleven point two,” Stanley said. And Sylvan nodded.)

Finny’s childhood memories were a clutter of impressions: dried-out fence posts, the feeling of wet grass slapping her feet and the swishing sound it made when she walked in it, swampy summer air, dandelion dust, snow days where everything was bleached white, bright cool fall afternoons turning to silver evenings, hills like a great green sea rolling into the distance. Only at the farthest edge of her vision did the land appear to flatten out. At the horizon there was a kind of green-gray ribbon, which could have been trees or even mountains, some sort of border. It was too far away to tell. But when she was very young, Finny always imagined going there, and in her mind that far-off and magical place got mixed up with ideas she had about her future, about what lay beyond this house.

Another thing Finny remembered: Sunday mornings. It was the only day Stanley didn’t go into work at the law firm, and he spent it with the family. He was very adoring of Finny’s mother. It showed in his formality in social situations, holding doors and pulling out chairs. Then, at least one Sunday every month he made breakfast in bed for Laura. He was an awful cook, and managed to impart the flavor of five-alarm chili into any dish he prepared. Even when he made French toast, he was able through a combination of seasoning and cooking techniques to capture the essence of five-alarm chili. Some avant-garde New York restaurants would have appreciated his secrets.

The kids would jump into bed with Laura, and since Stanley always made too much food, they’d help her eat it.

Finny’s mother ate happily, saying, “You spoil me, Stanley.

You’re too good.” Every time. Sylvan and Finny would lie in bed with her, sampling the charred remains of Laura’s breakfast, as Stanley beamed at his family from the couch in their bedroom.

Only Finny once said, “How could you possibly eat this?”

“Because to me it’s the best meal in the world,” Laura said.

“Do you get out much, Mom?” Finny asked.

Stanley broke in. “Did you know that Henry James went to a hundred and ten dinner parties in one year alone in England?”

“Really?” Sylvan said.

“Yes. Or maybe he had a hundred and ten invitations. In any case, it was some kind of record. And all that time he was writing
The Portrait of a Lady.
The only way I can make sense of it is that he was gathering material, observing the decadence and waste of a dying society so that he could write about the great unfulfilled potential of man.”

“Isn’t
Portrait of a Lady
about a lady?” Finny asked.

“Yes,” Stanley said, looking confused. “What’s your point?”

“You said the ‘potential of
man
.’”

“Ah,” Stanley said. “When I say ‘man,’” he explained in his most professorial voice, “I mean it in the broadest sense. I am talking about all of us, collectively. I’m saying it in the way that a great man once said, ‘The effect of the law is to make men good.’” He paused long enough to give weight to this remark, then said, “Aquinas.”

“Then why don’t you say
people?”
Finny asked. She knew it was just the way you said it. But still. It irked her.

“Because it’s simpler,” Sylvan said, then looked at his father, who nodded.

“But it’s wrong,” Finny said, her voice breaking, betraying anger. She knew it didn’t matter, but the comment stuck in her somehow.

“Right or wrong,” Stanley said, “that is the convention.”

“The convention is stupid,” Finny said, wanting to say more, to fight about it, to make clear how ridiculous she thought all his conventions were. She felt her family’s eyes on her, her mother’s smile like a barrier pushing her back.

“Speaking of ladies,” Laura said, giving Finny a meaningful look, “I’m not sure you’re acting like one right now.”

“Mom, if you had a penis, you would act like a lady.” Finny wasn’t sure what it meant, but she was so agitated that the words just spilled from her, like water from a cracked glass.

“That’s disgusting talk,” Laura said, and Finny noticed she was sucking in little breaths, about to cry. “And we—we were having such a nice breakfast,” Laura sputtered. “Why can’t you ever just let it be when things are going nicely?”

“Sweetheart,” Stanley said, getting up from the couch, walking over to her. “She’s nothing.”

What he actually said was, “It’s nothing,” but for some reason Finny heard him wrong.

Stanley put his hand on Laura’s shoulder. “Don’t you think it’s enough, Finny?” he said, holding his wife like a demonstration of all Finny had screwed up.

“This food tastes like burnt!” Finny screamed, and stomped out of the room.

“It doesn’t really,” she heard her brother telling her father as she walked down the hall.

There seemed to be something about her family that Finny couldn’t take in. Or maybe it was her family who couldn’t take
her
in. All their agreements and rules, rituals and defenses and bargains, it was all wrapped in a fog of mystery, a haze that Finny wasn’t sure would burn off in the light of experience.

Finny spent that afternoon in her bedroom, trying not to cry, then giving herself over to it in short, maudlin bursts. She stuffed her face into her pillow and howled, shook with tears. The thought of it, of how she looked, made her sick. If one of her parents or her brother had walked in during these brief concessions to grief, Finny probably would have hopped out the window, or pretended she was trying to suffocate herself. Anything to not be seen like this, so vulnerable, so compromised. She thought of herself like the white birch tree in her parents’ yard, which grew far away from all the other trees because it would wither in their shade. On its own, though, it flourished. She wanted to be like that, so odd and lonely and strong.

She thought of things she could do to get them. She could stick a knife in her shirt and spill some ketchup on it, so it would look like she’d stabbed herself. Or she could take one of her mom’s earrings and hide it and pretend Raskal ate it. Or stick pictures of women inside her dad’s great men books. But all these ideas seemed silly, a little clumsy. She could see them shaking their heads at her, like she’d tripped over her shoelace, or accidentally put her underwear on over her pants. She was hopeless, they’d think, a bum toaster or a wobbly table, something they’d just have to live with because they’d already shelled out the cash.

So she did the only thing that made sense to her. She ran away.

She headed for the sliding glass doors in the back of the house. She thought it might be tricky to get out without anyone seeing her, that her mother might ask her where she was going, or her brother would stop her to see if she’d been crying and she would have to make up some story about her allergies, or how she’d just gotten up from a nap. But the house was quiet. They were tucked into some rooms, somewhere, watching movies or reading or doing work. Sometimes Finny imagined her dad with his great men like a kid with his toy soldiers, lining them up and having them fight, making little machine gun noises with his mouth.

She slid the door open, stepped out, closed it behind her.

This was in the fall. She walked down the hill to the split-rail fence that surrounded the horse pastures behind her house. She started walking along the fence, in the high grass. Some horses trailed alongside her. It was cool outside, and she hadn’t brought a coat, just a little green sweatshirt she liked to wear, with a hood she sometimes tied so that only her nose and eyes stuck out. She called the sweatshirt “the green reaper.” The sun was low and bright in her eyes, and the air had that smoky fall smell. A breeze carried the musky scent of the horses to her every now and again, and also the smells of crackly leaves and dirt and grass and manure.

At the end of the fence Finny turned up the dirt path through the old vineyard that had been out of commission for years. On both sides of her some leafy vines wrapped a wire trellis, making a green wall that was just taller than Finny’s head. Plants sprouted from cracks in the hard soil, winding in with the vines. Finny loved coming here when she was by herself; this place had a magical feeling to her, like those hills she could just barely make out from her bedroom window. She kicked rocks and listened to the sound of her shoe soles scraping the dusty ground. She liked the noise of it, the bite of cold air on her face, her hands plunged warmly in the green reaper’s pockets.

She thought of her mother.
It’s almost dinner
, Laura said.
Where’s Finny?

I don’t know
, Stanley said.
Sylvan! Do you know where your sister is?

She left the vineyard, walking away from her house. She went up the dirt road that snaked through some hills where cows grazed in the afternoons. This was as far up as she’d ever gone. But she kept walking. Past a decrepit horse barn with a sagging roof, the rails in front of its entrance collapsed so that they made an
X.
Past a little pond with a fountain in it that someone had made on his property. Finny could hear the water splashing. Inside the pond there were some exotic-looking birds the man must have also bought. They had long, pointy beaks, and black lines around their eyes. Their feathers were streaked with bright colors, purple and gold and green. They looked at Finny through their lined eyes, with serious, arrogant expressions, like the women in fur coats with big leather purses whom Finny had seen on Madison Avenue when she’d gone to New York. She spotted one of their feathers—a blue and silver one—on the grass beside the pond, and picked it up, put it in her pocket.

She walked up a steep hill that was covered in onion grass so it smelled like cooking. When she got near the top, where it flattened out, she saw a pasture on the other side of another split-rail fence. But this fence was in bad shape, bending under Finny’s weight when she tried to climb it. She was almost over when one of the boards cracked beneath her foot, and she let out a little scream and fell back.

Only she didn’t fall. Something stopped her. Held her. Eased her down onto the grass.

“Thanks,” Finny said, before she even saw who had saved her.

“It’s okay,” the voice said back, and when she turned around, she saw that it belonged to a boy. He was shorter than she was, and a little chubby in the face. His body was like none Finny had ever seen. It looked like a man’s, with broad shoulders and strong arms—but smaller, and with shorter legs. Like the kind of pictures you can mix and match—a man’s top half on a child’s legs.

“I just saw you coming towards that fence,” he said, “and I know it’s bad. I got hurt on it once. I was going to say something, but you were already on it.” He had a high voice, a slightly embarrassed way of speaking, that didn’t go with his man’s body at all. She noticed his cheeks got a little color when he talked to her.

“Thanks,” Finny said again, not knowing what else to say. She wasn’t sure if he was fishing for compliments.

But he just said, “Come on. I’ll show you the easiest way to get up there.”

They walked along the fence a little, and he showed her a place where two boards had cracked, so that all they had to do was duck a little to get under the top one.

“Easier to go under than over,” the boy said.

“Especially for you,” Finny said, not knowing why she’d said it. The words had just popped out—it was the way she liked to challenge people, to press a little and see if they pressed back. It seemed mean, though, and she wanted to say she was sorry. After all, he’d saved her life.

But he just laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I can fit in tight places.”

She still wanted to apologize, but he just walked on to the middle of the pasture, as if he’d forgotten what she’d said.

The middle of the pasture was also the top of a hill that overlooked the valley. The sun was almost down behind the trees now, and the sky was a crystal gray-blue color. They sat down without saying anything. The valley looked like a giant checkerboard of cornfields, forests, and fields. The land was spotted with barns and farmhouses, sectioned by dirt paths and meandering roads. Finny heard the distant shout of a farmer calling in his horses from the fields, and also some birds tweeting and the buzzing of insects.

“How do you know about this?” she asked the boy.