Off Season (12 page)

It was, perhaps, a kind of magic that Jon was here with me. For many days, his time had been filled only with sailing with my father, lunch and resting at his house—whatever that meant—tennis with his father, dinner with his parents, and evenings at home. I saw him only from the dock, to wave at, or at night when he brought Wilma home, and then he could not stay. His father waited up for him. We did not even have time to talk, but once he picked me up in his arms and whirled me around on our dew-wet starlit front lawn, with Wilma capering and jangling around us, and said, as he put me down, “I miss you.”

“Me too,” I had responded, tears prickling in my eyes. “When do you think—”

“I don’t know,” he said, turning his face away from me, and then back. “But pretty soon. Mom is really pissed with Dad about all this resting-at-home shit—’scuse me, Lilly, crap—and says she’s going to talk to him about it. She’s the one who told me to skip the routine and go do whatever I wanted to with whomever I wanted to when he went to New York Monday. I think she’s going to have it out with him when he gets back.”

I smiled into the red darkness of my own flesh, under the sun. “I hope so. This has been a good week, hasn’t it?”

“The best.”

During our first weeks of June, I had done the things I always did in early summer at Edgewater. Cecie and I had indeed had the great virginal leg shaving, in the old claw-footed bathtub in our upstairs bathroom. It was pitted and stained with decades of Maine’s mineral-rich water, and so short you had to lie on your back with your legs hanging over the end if you wanted to wash your hair under the faucet. It belched and gurgled and finally spat out icy water that took eons to warm up, so only the patient at Edgewater ever had hot baths. I sat on the side with my feet and legs in it and Cecie crouched in it with the water dribbling, armed with a can of her father’s shaving cream and a rusted razor, which she assured me had a new blade. I closed my eyes until she was done, waiting to feel the stinging bite of the blade, but when she said “There, now you’ve got sexy legs,” only my red-blond stubble whirled away down the drain, no threads of blood among it.

For days I felt naked and somehow indecent without my leg hair, and wore only blue jeans, but then a vicious little heat spell settled in and I pulled out my soft, faded old shorts. Looking down, I saw long, tanned legs that shone in the sun from the furtive sluicings of my mother’s Jergens lotion that I employed as per Cecie’s instructions. I held up one, and then the other, and then laced up my sneakers and crept out into the morning where the others waited restlessly for me. We had at last been given permission to ride our bikes as far as the top of Caterpillar Hill, and everybody was milling around in our front yard, balancing on their bikes and making circles on my mother’s flower beds. Some were still chewing on Clara’s toast.

When Cecie and I appeared, they jeered at our lateness and straightened up their bikes, waiting, I knew, for me to walk my blue Schwinn to the top of our driveway so we could move out. With my damp, naked legs catching the little wind off the reach, I was stricken with such self-consciousness that I could not move. Peter Cornish, whom we had overheard our mothers say would probably be in some kind of sexual trouble before he was sixteen, stared at my legs and said suddenly and loudly, “Lilly’s shaved her legs! Look, everybody, Lilly’s shaved her legs!”

Everybody stared.

Since it would have been ridiculous to protest that I had not, I wound one leg around the other and stood like a stork, staring belligerently around the group.

“Well, at least I
can
shave,” I said. “That’s more than you guys can say.”

“Well, you don’t have to get snotty,” Peter said. “Did you think nobody would notice? God, Lilly, we look at your legs every day. They’re what hold you up—how could we not? But I have to admit they look kind of . . . nice now. Like you could lick something sweet off them.”

My face flamed all the way to my collarbones and I mounted my bike and pushed off up the little dirt road. I knew everyone would follow. It had always been the natural order of things at Edgewater and I thought little about it, except for sometimes feeling a sneaking conceit that I was the leader.

But on this day I would have given anything I had to be at the back of the pack, hairy legs pumping like pistons, wind from the others’ slipstreams in my hair.

It had always been the best day of the summer, this first bicycle excursion. After a year of structured city outings and fretting about how we looked, the piney wind in our hair and the young June sun biting our pale limbs red was nirvana. But somehow this one died at birth.

We dropped our bikes on their sides in the great, low tangle of the blueberry barrens that swept from the top of Caterpillar Hill, around massive boulders and outcroppings of glacial rock, down to the lip of the reach. In another month the barrens would swarm with pickers, mostly migrant workers from Canada, many of them Acadians with the soft, indecipherable patois of Arcady. Sometimes they had small tents or shacks in which they slept, and occasionally we might spy, far away from them on the fringes of the barren, two or three of the small, thin bears who had shambled among us when we first came to Edgewater, looting garbage cans and terrifying newcomers but doing little harm. When the blueberries ripened I think all the bears in our part of Hancock County headed for the barrens and, for the rest of the summer, gorged on sun-fermented blueberries until they trundled tipsily into the woods to their lairs and slept their benders off, only to start again the next day. My father often said he wished the more notorious drinkers of his acquaintance would behave as well.

In the late fall the barrens turned an electric purple red, a color I have never seen anywhere else; it seemed to be lit from within. But I did not see it so until much later.

We ate the sandwiches Clara had left for us and balled up the waxed paper and put it in our bicycle baskets and waited for the alchemy to catch up with us, the giddiness that would seize us and propel us, wild as woods colts with joy, through the rest of the summer.

It did not come.

I don’t think they were waiting for me to give the “Gentlemen, start your engines” sign, it was just that somehow no one spoke or moved, and the silence spun out, until finally Carolyn Forrest said, timidly—for Carolyn was an enthusiastic follower but had never, that I could recall, initiated any action—“Clara’s dog has got puppies. Do y’all want to go see them? Clara says they’re real pretty, little wolf-dog puppies, but Daddy says they’re illegal in Maine because their daddy was a wolf and they’d always have a wild streak. So I can’t have one of them but I’m going to get a puppy this summer anyway. But it might just be fun to see wolf-dog puppies.”

“If you’re going to get a puppy you better check with Peaches first and see if she hollers,” Joby Gardiner said. “But let’s go see them. I’ve never seen a wolf-dog.”

“Where is Peaches?” Cecie asked. “I didn’t hear any screaming and Mrs. Davenport didn’t invite me to one of Peaches’ little dos.”

“She’s going with her grandparents down to Rockland to the art museum,” Peter said. “We all got invited but I said we’d already promised to ride up Caterpillar Hill with Lilly. That’s when she screeched. Her grandparents don’t want her on a bicycle yet. Didn’t you get invited, Lilly?”

“No,” I said, both overjoyed and stung. Who was Peaches Davenport to exclude me from outings in my own domain?

“She’s mad at you because she thinks that Jon guy has a crush on you.” Peter smirked. “Well, everybody else thinks so, too. Is there something you want to tell us, Lilly? Like spending a whole afternoon over on Sunderson’s with him?”

I was suddenly furious.

“I wouldn’t tell you crap, Peter Cornish,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You never do.”

“Well, I know that Peaches has a crush on the guy and thinks you do, too. If I were you I’d watch my back, Lilly.”

After that I did not want to see wolf-dog puppies or much of anything else, so I coasted on home while the rest went swooping past me and down into the village, to Seth and Clara’s house on the road to the public harbor. By that time it was nearing two o’clock. The Beetle Cat was tied up at our dock, so I knew Jon’s sailing lesson was over and he was gone. The house was quiet and still, with that fathomless midafternoon, dust-moted silence old houses sometimes get, and I could find no one about. Clara had long finished in the kitchen and everything was shined and put away; my father was closeted in his study in pursuit of a warbling John Donne, and I knew that my mother was upstairs in her studio. She had been painting feverishly for a week or so, in one of the fits that sometimes took her, and had forbidden anyone to disturb her. No one had.

But I felt, suddenly, that I could not bear this echoing tomb of a house, and so I crept up the stairs and pushed open the door to her studio. The first thing I saw was the tweed-clad back of Brooks Burns. The second was what he was doing. I backed away from the door, my breath gagging in my throat, and ran silently down the stairs out into the air and light of afternoon. I sat on the seawall for a long time, struggling to find the rhythm of the sea’s breathing, thinking nothing at all. When I finally got my breath and stood up, I knew that my world had changed, and I felt like I was floating over an abyss that had no bottom.

I wanted with all the force of my being to run to someone for comfort and the restoration of my world, and knew even in the wanting that there was no one. I wanted—I wanted Jon.

But I knew I would never tell him what I had seen. I thought I would never tell anybody. There was no one I could tell who would not, like me, be changed. I sat on the wall for a long time.

It was then that I began to spy on my mother.

I never went back to the studio. I was very careful about my covert routine. I am sure no one saw me. But that summer I learned more about my beautiful mother than I had in the past eleven years of my life, though nothing that would explain what I had seen in the studio that first day. Chiefly, I think, I began to learn about being a woman. But I did not know it then.

For the next two weeks I seldom went out with the group to bicycle or swim or sail. No, I told my mother, I didn’t feel ill in any way. No, I had not had a squabble with anyone. No, no one had said anything that hurt my feelings. I just—an inspiration took me—felt like reading. There were some things I had brought from home that I was dying to read.

“About what?”

“Mythology,” I said, having no idea where the word had come from but hearing in it the absolute rightness, the sure balm for my naked, quivering heart.

“Mythology?” Her straight, silky brows knotted. I stared into her face. I do not think I looked at her breasts for the rest of the summer, and for a long time after.

“Yes, I’m reading”—my mind fastened on a dusty old book I had seen in the attic, how many years ago I did not remember—“
The Golden Bough
.”

My mother looked at my father. He looked at me for a moment, and then smiled.

“Yes. A fine work, even if it is nearly undecipherable and overwhelmingly ponderous. If it speaks to you, Lilly, by all means dive in. It doesn’t speak to many people.”

And so, with my father’s blessing, I spent long days in the attic lair I had fixed up with two broken Morris chairs, a rickety table, and a frayed old Oriental rug set under a window that gave onto the sea. I was giddy on Sir James George Frazer and spying on my mother. My father was right. The great, seminal book of the old religions and folklore and magic did speak to me. I never forgot it; I sometimes went back to it many years later. I think that learning about the wild, fire-shot, naked ancient world was the thing that saved me from total obsession with my mother.

And then Jon came back, and I forgot both in the joy of being with him.

At the beginning of this week, his father’s overall manager of the quarries died of a heart attack and left in his shadow such a tangled mess of mismanagement and perhaps even larceny that there was nothing for it but for Arthur Lowell to go back to Rockville, New York, and pick up the pieces.

He was grim faced and furious. I learned later that Jon got the brunt of much of his anger. At first he wanted to take Jon with him as far as Eaglebrook and put him into the summer program so that he could keep up his tennis with the instructor there. When his wife said, simply, “He is not going,” he sought to find an instructor in Ellsworth or Bangor who might, for whatever sum necessary, come and drill Jon in his absence.

Claire Lowell simply looked at him.

“All right, by God,” he snapped finally. “But you see that he practices every day with somebody who’s a match for him. Get that doddering old pro over at the colony. Or there must be somebody around here who can give him at least a decent game.”

“The Forrest twins’ father is good, Arthur, and I know he’d be happy to play with Jon. Go on, or we won’t be able to afford tennis lessons or anything else.” All this Jon told me on the first day we came together. He had, he said, listened from the kitchen. I wanted to hug him. So someone else did it, too.

And so, finally, Claire Lowell drove her husband to Bangor, where he caught a rattletrap commuter flight to New York, and on the morning after he went, my father said to Jon, “I need a week or two to myself right now. I’m on to something promising with Donne, I think. Can we pick up sailing a bit later?”

Minutes after he spoke, Jon and I were on mine and Jeebs’s bicycles, heading out.

“Won’t Jeebs want his?” Jon asked me that first morning, swinging onto Jeebs’s old ’cycle with his rangy athlete’s grace.

“He hasn’t ridden it in ages,” I said. “He’s going around with some kids from the colony this summer. One of them has a car.”

“Great.” He grinned, and his smile lit the world.

We rode everywhere. We spent hours on the twisting dirt tracks off Reach Road toward the west, most of which ended in ramshackle, unpainted, falling-down houses with high-piled firewood and corpses of long-dead cars and abandoned lobster traps and buoys. Only occasionally did we see anyone around them, and the ones we did see were dark and almost feral looking, not offering the one-lifted-finger wave that is the traditional acknowledgment of another in Maine. We did not linger around these houses. Maine was a sporadically poor state behind the prosperous, white-painted saltwater farms that lined the front roads and the beetling old summer cottages down on the shore. We were deep in this other Maine when we came into the purview of these houses, and knew on our skins we were not wanted. We would lift our forefingers slightly, nod, and pedal briskly back the way we had come.