The Goodbye Summer (3 page)

Nana had been on a sort of quasi-macrobiotic diet ever since she’d read somewhere it would increase her life span by seven to nine years. But only if she started it in her twenties; she’d missed that part, and Caddie hadn’t had the heart to point it out. Driving by the local supermarket on her way home from Wake House, it occurred to her that yin and yang were now the cook at Wake House’s worry, not hers, and she could eat anything she liked. She went in and bought half a pound of salmon, some fresh dill, a huge baking potato, salad makings (including
tomatoes,
which, macrobiotically speaking, never went with anything), and a pint of her favorite ice cream, chocolate almond, which she never got at home because Nana had diverticulosis and couldn’t eat nuts. She’d cheer herself up by having a feast. With wine. And some magazines—all she had at home to read were improving books.
Kick up your heels,
Nana had said.
Go wild.
Well, okay, Caddie thought, opening the car windows and turning the radio up loud. If I must.

She had shut Finney up in her bedroom so he wouldn’t be underfoot while she moved Nana’s things, then forgotten to let him out on the last trip. As soon as she opened the door, he bolted between her legs, down the hall, down the stairs, and started on one of his circular tears, hall, dining room, kitchen, living room, around and around until he ran out of breath. Then he started barking.

“
Good
boy,” she told him when he did his long, relieved business on the grass between the street and the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Tourneau’s house.
Say what you would about Finney’s bad habits, and he had a million, at least he was housebroken.

The same mini-revelation she’d had driving past the grocery store came over her again as she was deciding what music to put on while she made her dinner, her feast. She could play anything. Jazz, for example. Nana hated it, so she made cracks about it; the more progressive the jazz, the more sarcastic the cracks.
Ha!
Caddie thought, with an airy feeling in her chest, and put on
Bitches Brew.

She listened to her phone messages while she uncorked her nine-dollar bottle of sauvignon blanc. Larry Fish’s mother had canceled his violin lesson; she’d forgotten his appointment with the orthodontist tomorrow. “Grrr,” Caddie said to the dog. “That’s against the rules.” She sent flyers out every few months, clarifying the cancellation policy: forty-eight hours minimum. Try getting Mrs. Fish to pay for that missed lesson, though. “There goes thirty bucks,” she told Finney. Oh, great—was she going to start talking to the dog? The rest of the messages were requests to reschedule, one legitimate cancellation, and Rayanne Schmidt calling to report she’d spilled Dr Pepper on her electric keyboard and now she was afraid to turn it on.

Might as well go all out and eat in the dining room, Caddie decided. It looked a little sad, one lonely place setting at the head of the table. But she and Nana always ate in the kitchen, and she was setting new precedents tonight. Breaking with tradition. What the heck—she’d light candles, too.

Her grandmother had probably finished dinner by now. If she hadn’t gone straight up to her room, she might be sipping tea and chatting in one of the parlors, making new friends. People who weren’t afraid of Nana really liked her. Would she like them, though? There were two elderly old-maid sisters, Bea and Edgie Copes, who’d brought an African violet to Nana’s room this morning, a little welcoming present. “I hope you two aren’t married to the same man,” Nana had greeted them, and they tittered like young girls. Caddie thought they were charming, but when they left, her grandmother had pronounced them “too sweet.”

Should she call Nana now, just to see how she was doing? No—no,
she decided, they were better off on their own tonight. Learning to do without each other.

The phone rang.
I knew it,
she thought,
I should’ve called first.

“Hey, Caddie. Can I ask you—what do you think of Angela Ann Noonenberg?”

“Angie?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Angela Ann—how does that sound?”

“Well…good, it sounds very nice. Is that your name?” Angie was Caddie’s best violin student, and still only a junior in high school.

“No. Okay, what do you think of Angela May Noonenberg?”

“Um…well, which one is your name?”

“Neither, I don’t have a middle name. Mom thinks I should have three names, but I don’t know. You know, for the
pageant.
I told her she should’ve thought of that about seventeen years ago.”

“So you’d just add a name?”

“Sure, you can do it easy, you just start using it, writing it on all your stuff, and pretty soon it’s like grandfathered in or something. Mom says it’s perfectly legal.”

Angie had been Miss Apple Blossom Festival last fall, and before that Miss Junior Grape, but she and Mrs. Noonenberg, a former beauty queen herself, had bigger things in mind, beginning with Miss Michaelstown next December. “But I don’t understand,” Caddie said. “Why do you need three names?”

“Mom thinks it’ll give me a better chance, either that or being named Heather. There’ve been two Miss America Heathers since ’95. But Mary Ann Mobley’s the most famous of all time except for Vanessa Williams, so we’re thinking three names is the way to go. So which do you like, Angela Ann or Angela May?”

“Angela Ann, I guess. My middle name’s Ann.”

“It is?”

“Catherine Ann Winger.”

“Wow, I never even knew that. Okay, Ann, that’s settled. Okay, listen, you’re gonna be mad at me on Wednesday.”

“Uh-oh.” She held the phone with her shoulder so she could chop a scallion. “I know it’s hard to practice this time of year, everything’s starting to—”

“Yeah, no, not that, I’ve been practicing okay, I mean fairly okay, although this piece is really
hard.
”

“Slow and steady.” Angie had chosen “Meditation” from
Thaïs
for the talent portion of the pageant, and it was a challenge for her.

“Right, although how this music could get any
slower
—but no, remember what we talked about last time? Towards the end? About my fingernails!”

“Oh, yes. You said you were going to cut them.”

“Yeah, but if I cut them now they’ll look lame for the prom. I’ll cut them right after, okay? The very next day, out they go. Okay?”

She cleaned off the cutting board and started on a mushroom. “Fine, but this is a critical time, don’t forget. You’re beginning a new, important piece—”

“Which I already don’t even like.”

“—and you want to begin it correctly. If your nails are too long, you’re going to internalize poor technique and then waste time unlearning it. But it’s up to you.”

“
God,
I
hate
when you say that.”

She laughed. “Well, sorry.” Angie had been taking private violin lessons with her for almost four years; there wasn’t much about her dramatic teenage life Caddie didn’t know. “What’s wrong with ‘Meditation’? Last week you thought it was perfect.”

“It
is,
it’s just so,
God,
sappy or something. Okay, I gotta go, I just wanted to ask you about Angela Ann, so—okay, ciao.”

“Ciao.”

Students like Angie were what made teaching a joy. Adults could bring a lot of satisfaction, too, but Angie was one of her few students under eighteen or so who came to her voluntarily, not because their parents made them. She might not be a prodigy (if she were, Caddie wouldn’t have anything to teach her), but she had real talent, definite professional potential. All she needed was focus.

When dinner was on the table, Caddie unfurled a napkin, a
cloth
napkin, over her lap and sat up straight.
To me,
she toasted, eyeing her reflection in the dining room window. And to Nana. She wasn’t allowed to miss her, but she hoped her first night was going beautifully.

Mmm, the salmon was perfect, if she said so herself, and the dill sauce she’d whipped up without a recipe was superb. She was a good cook, she just didn’t get to practice much. When Nana wasn’t eating macrobiotically, she liked old-fashioned food, fifties food, lots of plain, starchy casseroles made with condensed soup. It would be fun to try some new recipes while she was away.

She sighed, moving a piece of potato from one side of her plate to the other. What was she doing, anyway, sitting by herself in romantic candlelight in the dining room, acting as if she was worth it? Now that she wasn’t starving, she felt silly. And bored. Dinner conversation between her and her grandmother might not be riveting, but they talked about how their day had gone, gossiped about Caddie’s students; Nana always had a peculiar take on something in the news. They’d lived together for almost all Caddie’s life, but they’d never gotten like an old married couple, silent and uninterested, or so in tune with each other’s deepest feelings that words weren’t necessary. Nana
loved
to talk. And Caddie, who was shy with everybody, wasn’t shy with her, so eventually her grandmother got to hear just about everything she was thinking. In a thousand ways Caddie hadn’t begun to appreciate—but she guessed she would soon—they depended on each other.

Fine, but she wasn’t going to sit here and mope about it. That was the point of this nice dinner, and she
was
worth it. Dr. Kardashian had harped on that the whole two years she’d been able to afford him. “If you aren’t kind and loving to yourself, Caddie, who else will be?” It all went back to her mother, was his theory, whose abandonment behavior had inculcated a pervasive sense of unentitlement. Too bad he didn’t know a cure.

Except for being kind and loving to herself. Which she decided to put into practice by skipping the dishes, lying on the sofa, and reading her fashion magazines while she ate ice cream out of the carton.

She always felt older than the women in women’s magazines. Not
smarter, definitely not, she felt like a twelve-year-old compared to them—but in her outlook, as if she were from a different generation. She didn’t even understand the language. Who were these people who thought about what shade of brown their mascara was? Who studied the ever so slightly different shades of beige in the artful photos of foundation smears and little mounds of powder? Caddie almost always thought the girl in the Before picture looked better than the one in the After.

She was a sucker for the quizzes, though. She took them all, the personality tests, the face-shape tests, the body language tests. She always came out Nature Girl or Miss Sensitive, Best Friend, Mother Earth, never Sex Goddess or Big Flirt or Bitchin’ Babe. Her body mass index was twenty-one, which was thin, but try getting any sympathy for being too thin. You were a voice crying in the desert.

“What is your best feature?” There was always a questionnaire about that. If you thought it was your eyes, you should “play them up,” presumably with new shades of mascara. Caddie thought her large, innocent-looking blue-gray eyes were her best feature on the basis of one comment, “You have pretty eyes,” from a boy she’d gone out with in college. So she’d asked Nana, “What do you think of my eyes?” and she’d answered, “You’ve got Winger eyes. We all look dazed.”

As for her worst feature, she had as much body anxiety as the next person, so the list was long: big feet, veiny hands, freckles, fair skin that wouldn’t tan, dirty-blonde hair that just hung there, small breasts, not enough butt. She could go on. Supposedly men never even
saw
the flaws women obsessed over, at least that’s what all the articles claimed, and as proof they’d quote actual men saying things like, “I personally
like
seeing a girl’s panty line, I think it’s sexy.”

She got up, restless. She felt like doing something, changing something, and it was too late to call up her hairdresser and tell her to cut everything off. Not that she would have, anyway. Impulsiveness wasn’t one of her vices; she even corrected people who said “Moderation in all things” to “Moderation in
most
things.” But she was in the oddest mood tonight to take a positive step toward
something.

This room. Nana’s living room. Caddie hated it. She couldn’t sit down on the couch without first having to move Paulo and Francesca, life-size
stuffed dolls her grandmother had made on the sewing machine, and she couldn’t let a student in the house without first making sure Nana hadn’t arranged the dolls in suggestive postures.
Out.
She scooped them up and carried them upstairs. Let them do whatever they liked on Nana’s bed till she came home.

That was easy. The fireplace screen would be harder, because it was the chrome grille of a 1979 Cadillac El Dorado her grandmother had scavenged from a junkyard. It still had dead bugs stuck to it, or the desiccated stains dead bugs had left long ago, and Caddie wasn’t allowed to clean them off because they were the “best part.” The grille was a heavy, awkward armful, she got stuck turning the corner between the kitchen pantry and the basement steps, but she did it, retired the monster to a corner by the furnace. She’d put a big, frilly fern in its place, or some coleus, something light and colorful and
alive.

Next: Nana’s paintings, weird sculptures, and religious icons on the walls and tables and on top of the piano. Caddie didn’t have enough things of her own to replace them, but even flowers would be an improvement. And she did have a few pictures and prints she’d bought while she was in graduate school and had her own little apartment. They were in the attic—she went up and got them, dusted them off, and brought them back down. Tomorrow she’d hang them on the off-white walls. Get some pillows for the couch to replace the dummies. Bring in some of the peonies blooming in the side yard. She could see it already, and it was going to be so much better. Luckily the carpet was as neutral as the walls, so the room could accommodate styles as opposite as hers and Nana’s.

But that was assuming she
had
a style. Maybe she didn’t, or only a style by default: anything that wasn’t Nana’s (flamboyant, attention-demanding, sort of willfully peculiar) was hers (quiet, conservative, so understated it was mute). She had an image in her mind of a scale between them, and it was up to her to keep it balanced. Or a seesaw, and she had to weigh more on her side or Nana would shoot her up in the air, like the big, older kid who tosses you up and you’re stuck there until he grins and flexes his knees and sends you down fast,
wham,
your whole backbone vibrating from the blow…. Anyway, Caddie’s job was to balance her
grandmother’s eccentricity with her ordinariness, and it had been that way for as long as she could remember.
Look, the Winger family is okay, because I’m not crazy! She is, but I’m not!