Summerland: A Novel (16 page)

What was wrong with her parents? Didn’t they see that they needed to stop bringing her food and make her exercise instead? Didn’t they see that she had to get out of her foul-smelling hole of a room and into the sunshine? Didn’t they see that she needed to earn money rather than have it handed to her? Didn’t they see that the make-believe world they lived in was so paralyzing that their daughter couldn’t bear to live in it sober?

I’m fat, she thought. I’m unpopular. I’m a drunk. I said something inexcusable to Penny, which ended up being worse than I ever could have imagined, because now Penny is dead.

Demeter composed her face. Her father was a bit more worldly than her mother; if anyone was going to catch on that she was inebriated, it was Al.

“I want to work, Dad. We told Kerry that I’d work for him, and I plan to stand by that. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with proving my character.”

“It’s just so soon,” Al Castle said. “Kerry understands what you’ve been through.”

That was doubtful. Demeter suspected that what was really happening here was that Al and Lynne thought it would look bad if she started working too soon. They subconsciously wanted her
to stay in her room all summer, growing fatter and stinkier and more bored and slothful and useless—because that way Lynne could continue to tell the women she bumped into at the grocery store that her daughter “wasn’t doing too well.” This would be preferable, according to the fucked-up social politics of year-round Nantucket, to admitting that just weeks after the tragic accident that had claimed her friend’s life, Demeter was productive and happy and loving her new job.

She won, as she knew she would. Her parents couldn’t keep her from doing anything. On her first day of work Demeter wore cargo shorts, a gray T-shirt, a flannel shirt, socks and sneakers, a bandanna in her hair, and a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators. She looked in the mirror. The outfit wasn’t too awful. The flannel shirt was long enough to cover her backside; the shorts came to her knees. She liked the way she looked in her sunglasses, and the bandanna was cool, she thought.

She took a backpack, empty except for two bottles of water and a banana.

“You’ll starve,” her mother said.

“I’ll be fine,” Demeter said.

She hadn’t driven since the accident, but she drove now; the thought of Al Castle’s dropping her off was mortifying. She had a two-year-old Ford Escape, one benefit of her father’s owning the car dealership. She drove to the headquarters of Frog and Toad Landscaping, which was out near the airport. She’d polished off the last two fingers of vodka that morning, then brushed her teeth. The vodka so early in the morning on an empty stomach gave her a little sparkle, a secret glow; it took the edge off things and even made her mother seem bearable.

Frog and Toad was the largest landscaping concern on the island. Kerry Trevor employed sixty-five people and ran seventeen
teams a day. When Demeter pulled down the dirt driveway, she saw people gathered in the gravel yard in front of the greenhouses. Hispanic men, college kids—everyone was older than Demeter. There was no one from Nantucket High School. It was possible that no one here knew what had happened, other than Kerry himself.

One of the Hispanic men—Demeter was unfortunately reminded of the man who had mopped up her 80-proof puke at the hospital—directed her into a parking spot. She grabbed her backpack and stepped out of the car. The other workers turned and stared at her. She knew what they were thinking: Fat girl. They wouldn’t be thinking this meanly; they would be thinking it only as a matter of course. There wasn’t enough vodka in the world to take away the daily sting of Demeter’s reality.

Kerry Trevor—blond, wiry, bouncing with energy—was giving out assignments. Team 1 to 85 Main Street, Team 2 to 14 Orange Street, Team 3 to Nonantum. Demeter was pretty sure Kerry had seen her walk over, but he hadn’t made eye contact with her. The sun was hot, and she was roasting in her flannel shirt. She felt herself break out into a light vodka sweat. This wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined her first day. She knew her father had called to prep Kerry for her arrival. She had thought he would take her aside, make sure she was at ease. Team 4 was headed to Tom Nevers. Team 5…

Demeter didn’t have a team. Kerry knew this, right? The group was getting smaller. Teams were hopping into the signature green Frog and Toad pickups and pulling out. The typical makeup of the teams seemed to be one older Hispanic man with one or two college kids. Demeter had known she’d be working on a team, but she’d been imagining all girls, girls who didn’t shave their armpits and didn’t pass judgment. Girls who played Phish in the truck and ate brown-bag lunches of hummus and sprout sandwiches on whole grain bread. Girls who would let Demeter be Demeter, who
wouldn’t notice her five trips to the bathroom, who wouldn’t ask her too many personal questions.

Suddenly Demeter heard her name. She snapped to attention. Kerry was looking right at her, but she hadn’t heard what he’d said. She felt as if she were in school, where this exact same thing was always happening.

She hoped her facial expression conveyed her need for clarification without making her appear to be too much of an idiot.

“You’re with Jesus, Nell, and Coop,” Kerry said. “Team Nine. Out to Two Seventy-seven Hummock Pond Road.”

Demeter stared at the googly-eyed bullfrog on the front of Kerry’s T-shirt. The vodka was making her dizzy. Or it was the heat and her absurd choice of flannel? She didn’t care what she looked like; she took the flannel shirt off and tied it around her waist. Better, cooler. Jesus, Nell, and Coop. And had Kerry said Hummock Pond Road? Really?

Tap on the shoulder. Tall boy, or perhaps Demeter should classify him as a man. He was about twenty or twenty-one, with dark, shaggy hair and a pronounced Adam’s apple. Not too attractive, thank God, but kind-looking.

“I’m Coop,” he said. “We’re over here.”

A green truck, just like all the other trucks. It had two rows of seating, but the backseat was tight, and Demeter immediately became conscious of her size.

“I’m Nell.” Nell was a girl with fiery red hair and freckles, wearing an Ithaca T-shirt; nothing threatening about her either. Okay, Demeter thought, this is okay. Do we get to keep our teams?

“I’m Demeter.”

“Cool name,” Nell said. “Goddess of something.”

“The harvest,” Demeter said. Another chance to despise her parents. They had named her brothers Mark and William, then gone all Bulfinch’s with her.

“The fertility of the earth,” Coop chimed in.

“I guess.”

“And I’m Jesus,” said the Hispanic man. He was about forty and had a musical voice. “Everyone calls me Zeus.”

“So we have Zeus and Demeter,” Nell said.

Camaraderie. Demeter smiled. This was the real world, out of high school. People were nice. They tried to make you feel included.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Demeter admitted. “I guess Kerry told my dad I might mow?”

No one answered her. Maybe they hadn’t heard. Coop tossed Zeus a set of keys, and Demeter had to worry again about how she was going to squeeze into the back of the truck.

Nell said, “Coop, you sit in the back with me?”

“I’ve been demoted,” Coop said.

Demeter blushed. Coop was too tall to sit in the back, he’d be chewing on his knees, but there was no way Demeter would fit. She took the front passenger seat and moved her seat as far forward as it would go.

“Gods and goddesses in the front,” Nell said.

That was nice.

They drove out Hummock Pond Road. Demeter thought it might cause her to have some kind of flashback. But the road was sunny and green and leafy, and there were families on bicycles headed to the beach. This road had little in common with the nightmare Demeter remembered. When she closed her eyes, she saw only black.

Zeus pulled in to the driveway for number 277 and they meandered through the woods to a clearing on the pond. The house was stunning, new construction, the shingles still sweet-smelling and yellow. There were no cars in the driveway. Demeter’s pulse quickened. Her mouth was cottony from the vodka, and her
stomach was starting to complain. She reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of water.

“Let’s go,” Coop said.

They climbed out of the truck. The house had a dozen hydrangea bushes in full periwinkle bloom, with beds of impatiens surrounding them. There was green lawn up to the woods. There were window boxes on the first-floor windows and geraniums hanging from the porch. The whole place seemed amazing to Demeter. She lived on the island year-round, she had been born here, she went to school here, and all of that gave her a sense of ownership. But there were houses like this one—hundreds of them, or possibly thousands—that were happy, isolated pockets of Nantucket, and which Demeter hadn’t even known existed.

There was a trailer attached to the back of the pickup, and in the trailer was the lawn mower. Coop pulled it out. It was an unwieldy contraption that looked nothing like either the riding mower or the push mower in Al Castle’s garage. Demeter grew anxious. Kerry had told Al that Demeter would be mowing lawns, but the truth was, she didn’t even mow the lawn at home. She had grown up with two brothers who did that chore, and then once Mark and Billy were gone, Al Castle had taken great joy in spending Saturday afternoons on his riding mower. Demeter had only once been allowed to mow just the perimeter of the yard.

She gazed at the machine. “I don’t know how to use that kind,” she confessed.

“No worries,” Coop said. “You won’t mow for weeks, if ever. It’s a privilege you have to earn.”

“It
is?
” Demeter said. “Kerry told my dad he was hiring me to mow.”

“Ha!” Nell said, though not meanly. “I only got to mow once last summer, and that was because I stuck around after all the kids from Colby went back to school.”

“Oh,” Demeter said. She felt like an idiot. She had actually
thought a summer of mowing would be beneath her, but now she’d discovered she wasn’t even good enough to mow.

“I’m mowing,” Coop said. “Zeus will check the window boxes and work on the containers in the back. And you two are going to—”

“Weed,” Nell said.

“Weed,” Demeter repeated. Weed? When she and Al and then Al and Kerry were discussing this job, the word
weed
had never come up. But what had she thought landscapers did? Mowed the grass, ate their lunches in the sun, put their hands in the dirt.

Demeter trailed Nell to the front beds. Nell handed her a pair of gloves, a five-gallon bucket, and a tool that looked like a larger version of what her dentist used to get plaque off her teeth.

“I’m going to do the back beds, and you do these front beds,” Nell instructed. “Just dig up all the weeds.”

“I don’t see any weeds.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Nell asked.

“No,” Demeter said. The impatiens and zinnias were embedded in rich, dark soil.

“Well, this is a weed here,” Nell said. She pulled on a green stalk that Demeter had thought was a legitimate plant. “And you have to use your trowel to get it out at the roots, okay? Without traumatizing the root systems of the other plants.”

Traumatizing.

“Okay,” Demeter said.

“And then when you’re done with the front beds, you’ll weed the brick walk. You see the green creeping up between the bricks? All of that has to come out.”

Demeter eyed the walkway. Weeds were squeezing through the bricks like the mildew that grew on the grout in the high school locker room showers. How would she ever,
ever
get all of those tiny weeds out?

“Okay,” Demeter said. She already felt like crying, and she hadn’t even started yet.

“Did you bring music?” Nell asked. She pulled an iPod and headphones out of her back pocket.

“No,” Demeter said.

“Tomorrow, bring music,” Nell said. “It will help.” She smiled at Demeter. “I know it’s a shitty job, and you’re low man on the totem pole. But you’ll grow to like it. I did. If you have any questions, come find me, okay?”

“Okay,” Demeter said.

Nell vanished around the side of the house. Demeter heard the motor of the mower start, and she watched Coop climb up onto the back of the mower and ride it across the yard standing up, like an Eskimo on a dog sled or a person on water skis. Demeter was glad she wasn’t mowing. She was so heavy, she might have broken the mower, or else she might not have been coordinated enough to stay upright as it rocketed forward.

She knelt in the grass and put on her gloves. Her hair felt like a heavy scarf down her back; her neck was sweating. She reached for what looked like a weed and yanked on it, but it offered resistance, so she was obliged to dig at it with her trowel. She tried to get under it the way Nell had done—Nell had made it look effortless—but it was harder than it looked. The top of the weed ripped off in Demeter’s left hand, the root system still lurking underground, where it would simply regenerate so that at this same time next week she would be pulling the very same weed. Like Sisyphus with his goddamned boulder. But that was the story of her life, wasn’t it, and her constant struggle with her weight? She could go for a day or two days or even five days eating only grapes and rice crackers and almonds, but then her hunger would build, it would roll over her, and she would tear open a bag of Fritos and eat them with an entire container of bacon- and-horseradish
dip, and then she would eat dinner with her parents: fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, two slices of peach pie with ice cream, and then an extra scoop of ice cream. And she would be right back at the bottom of the mountain with the boulder.

She threw the leaves into her bucket. Her first weed of the summer, her first of thousands, certainly, if she worked forty hours a week for the next eight weeks, three hundred and twenty hours, a hundred weeds an hour, thirty-two thousand weeds. And this was only the first one.

It hurt to kneel like this. The same was true at church; she couldn’t make it through the liturgy on her knees. She had to sit. She sat now with her legs splayed to the side, and she leaned forward to hunt down her next weed. She could hear Coop buzzing around behind her, but she didn’t turn to watch him because she most definitely did not want
him
watching
her
.