The Island (17 page)
She and Tate went upstairs together, they brushed their teeth and peed in front of each other, saving the poor toilet a flush, and then they each climbed into bed. Chess had a flashlight, and a LightWedge for reading, but once she was in bed, she lay there, feeling the dark. Twice that day, Tate had tried to initiate conversations with Chess about “all that had happened” with Michael Morgan, but Chess wouldn’t speak on the topic.
I don’t want to talk about it.
Now, under the blanket of complete darkness, Chess thought she might be able to share at least part of the story; she could start at the beginning, like she had in her journal, and see how far she got. As Chess arranged the thoughts and words in her mind, Tate, who had had a full and exhausting day, fell fast asleep.
Chess lay awake, thinking that this darkness, the absolute black, was what Michael was experiencing now. Michael had been warm and whole, he had been able to cradle a lacrosse ball and jog around the Reservoir, he could look you in the eye and shake your hand—but now he was dead and gone. There was no greater inequality than that between the living and the dead. It took Chess’s breath away, thinking about it. It terrified her more than the proximity of any bat could, until she could stand it no longer and she climbed into bed with Tate. It was the most basic comfort: her sister’s body, warm and breathing, keeping her safe.
On the third day, Chess was too miserable to write. She threw the notebook across the room.
The fourth day was the Fourth of July. The routine remained the same except Birdie put blueberries
and
strawberries in the pancakes and she wore a silk scarf printed with American flags around her neck, despite the fact that such a scarf was too fancy for Tuckernuck. Tate and India teased her about being a holiday junkie. Birdie wore the flag-printed scarf with the same enthusiasm that she wore her embroidered Christmas sweaters. Chess didn’t weigh in one way or the other.
There was a distraction during the ho-hum-reading-and-needlepoint-and-solitaire hour on the screened-in porch, and that was fireworks. On Nantucket, the town shot fireworks off the north shore and they were visible from the east coast of Tuckernuck: big, bright pyrotechnic posies, overlapping and unfolding. Chess heard the crackle. She wasn’t a huge fan of fireworks, but they seemed beautiful and important because she was alive and she could see them and Michael was dead and he couldn’t. His body was cold ash in a mahogany box.
Barrett didn’t come because of the holiday. Tate was in a pissy mood. She said it was because she was getting her period. She sang “Independence Day” by Bruce Springsteen at lunch, but she was painfully off-key.
S
he had her role: she was the mother. She was the girls’ mother, of course, which was both gratifying and frustrating (gratifying in regard to Tate, who appreciated every little thing Birdie did for her, and frustrating in regard to Chess, who didn’t notice anything Birdie did because she was so miserable). She was also India’s mother. She made India’s breakfast, she did India’s breakfast dishes, she washed India’s cotton Hanro underwear and hung it on the clothesline, she made the sandwiches that India liked, mirroring the ones served in the gourmet cafeteria at PAFA (goat cheese with red pepper, prosciutto with herb butter), she cut the corn off the cob for India, as she used to those summers when the kids had braces, because something was the matter with India’s bridgework. She did all the thankless tasks around the house—wiping the counters, brushing crumbs from the sofa cushions, trimming the wicks of the citronella candles, cleaning the toilet, and wiping toothpaste sludge from the sink. She kept the list for Barrett and made sure they had enough of everything. Really, there was nothing worse than running out of something on Tuckernuck—because, unlike on the mainland, one couldn’t just run to Cumberland Farms or Target to get more. In past summers, there had been days when Nantucket was fogged in and the planes didn’t fly and Grant hadn’t been able to get his
Wall Street Journal
—that was bad. They ran out of calamine lotion but only discovered it when Tate got stung by a wasp. They had run out of butter for the corn on the cob; they had run out of bread and English muffins and had to eat peanut butter straight from the jar. The Scout had run out of gas half a mile from the house when India and Bill were using it for one of their midnight sex jaunts. They ran out of toilet paper and had to use pages of the
Wall Street Journal.
They ran out of Kleenex and had to blow their noses on rags torn from old sheets. These were minor inconveniences and they had all turned into good stories, but it was Birdie’s responsibility as mother to make sure they had enough of everything at all times.
Birdie didn’t resent her role as mother, even when she was mothering her own sister. (Although this did occasionally give her pause. India was a mother, too, right? She had raised three boys and in less than two months would become a
grandmother,
and yet her maternal instincts were nonexistent. Perhaps she lost them when she went back to work in the fabulous Philadelphia art world, or when Bill died and she had enough money to hire people to do everything for her.) Birdie would say, however, that she was tired of being a mother, just as she had tired, three years earlier, of being a wife. Birdie wanted to be a person, the way India was a person. India was important, she had a career. Birdie didn’t have a career, but she could still be a person, right? She was trying. She had recently (four days earlier) taken up smoking, a fact that she was sure shocked and appalled her daughters (though neither of them had mentioned it) because they hadn’t known Birdie when Birdie was a smoker. Birdie had started smoking at the age of sixteen for one reason only: Chuck Lee smoked. Chuck Lee, who had been twenty-four to Birdie’s sixteen, smoked Newports aggressively and without thought. Birdie remembered being rendered speechless when she saw Chuck Lee flick a butt into the clear water that surrounded Tuckernuck, the water he was the guardian of. But instead of being disenchanted with Chuck for polluting a pristine ecological system, Birdie assumed that Chuck Lee was the captain of Tuckernuck’s waters and that therefore he was allowed to do as he wished upon them. Still, on more than one occasion, she had leaned over the side of the boat and plucked a soggy, bloated butt out of the water and stuffed it into the pocket of her shorts. Chuck caught her at this once and shook his head.
There was one occasion the summer Birdie was sixteen and India fourteen when Chuck Lee had delivered them to the island of Nantucket without their parents. Birdie and India had some school friends who had invited them over to Nantucket for croquet and lunch, and it was Chuck’s job to ferry the girls back and forth. Birdie had been far more excited about the time alone with Chuck in the boat than she was about either croquet or seeing her friends, and she knew India was, too. No sooner had the white crescent of their beach vanished than Chuck offered them each a cigarette. The gesture had been nothing but gallant back then; these days, it might have landed him in jail.
“Either of you smoke?” He held out the crumpled pack of Newports.
India accepted first, while Birdie stared on, as gape-mouthed as a bluefish. Chuck invited India back behind the windscreen so he could light her up with a match. India inhaled dramatically, then blew a stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth like a fifty-year-old truck stop waitress. Birdie realized in that instant: India had smoked before. Probably behind the public middle school with her miscreant friends. It was a good thing their parents were sending her to Miss Porter’s, Birdie thought. They didn’t allow so much as bad grammar at Miss Porter’s.
Chuck then looked to Birdie. He offered the crumpled pack. Birdie had never smoked in her life; she was afraid of choking or coughing or otherwise demonstrating her naïveté. But she couldn’t let herself be outdone by India, who was still weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday. Birdie accepted a cigarette and imitated India as best she could, though the cigarette felt foreign in her hand. Chuck might as well have handed her a baton and told her to conduct the orchestra. She inhaled shallowly; she blew smoke right into Chuck’s face.
Chuck indicated that the girls should take their cigarettes and sit up on the bow. They did. India said, “You have to
inhale.”
“Shut up,” Birdie said. She sucked deeply on the cigarette, then sputtered out a terrific cough. India giggled. Birdie wanted to throw her overboard. She glanced back at Chuck. His eyes were over the girls’ heads, on the intricacies of Madaket Harbor. He didn’t notice Birdie breathing fire. She inhaled again. It was better.
Birdie had smoked the following six summers (only when Chuck offered her a Newport, out of view of her parents), and then she smoked more seriously the year she worked at Christie’s. Then she met Grant. Grant despised cigarettes; his father had smoked two packs a day and died, gruesomely, of emphysema. So Birdie gave up smoking for Grant, and in quitting she had probably saved her own life. However, in retrospect, it felt like one more thing Birdie had had to cede to Grant, along with her career and her individual wants and desires. She had liked smoking and she was glad to be back at it, everyone else be damned.
The other thing that Birdie did to assert her personhood was against the Tuckernuck rules: she used her cell phone. If she was feeling energetic, she walked to Bigelow Point, though one day, after too much wine the night before, she drove the Scout. As Barrett had promised, if she took off her flip-flops and walked all the way out to where the water lapped at her ankles, she could get a signal. She could dial a number and the phone would ring and Hank would answer, and when Birdie spoke, he could hear her.
It was astonishing to Birdie from the moment she pulled onto I-95 at Exit 15 how much she missed Hank. Her missing him was like a sickness. Her heart ached; it was difficult to focus. India would be talking about a certain artist or about an Italian film she’d seen, and Birdie would be looking into India’s eyes, nodding, but not hearing a word. She could think only of Hank. Hank on his knees in her garden, throwing dirt-clumped weeds in the bucket, Hank asleep in the hotel bed. (Unlike Grant, who snored, Hank slept silently. When Birdie watched him, she was filled with the desire to touch him, kiss him, wake him up!) He was everything she wanted in a man. Birdie had been guilty of thinking, as they lay in bed after making love, that she wished she’d married Hank when she was young instead of Grant. This felt true but probably wasn’t. Would she have been happy with a young Hank, who started out as a history teacher at the Fleming-Casper School before becoming headmaster? Would she have risen to the responsibilities of being the headmaster’s wife—having to at once represent the elitist values of “the school” while at the same time kowtowing to the parents? Caroline, Hank’s wife, had done this brilliantly, but she had the advantage of personal wealth and of sitting on two other boards during her adult life (the Guggenheim and the New-York Historical Society), so that Caroline’s involvement at the Fleming-Casper School was, to her, just one more philanthropic duty. Birdie and Hank would have been an altogether different couple. They would have been forced to live someplace like Stuyvesant Town, in a rent-controlled apartment, or in Hoboken, or on Long Island. Their children would have gone to Fleming-Casper on scholarship rather than paying full tuition as Hank and Caroline’s children had. Birdie and Hank’s union, while potentially lovely, would have been hobbled by economics. They might have gotten divorced; Birdie might have been dreadfully unhappy.
But now Hank was retired and very comfortable. His children would inherit Caroline’s money, but he would keep the house in Silvermine and the four-bedroom prewar apartment on East Eighty-second Street. He was at a place in his life where he knew what made him happy: food and wine, literature, painting, film, travel, the politics of President Obama, music, gardening. These were the exact things that made Birdie happy. And he was so cute, with his hair and his glasses and his smile. He chewed a certain kind of fruit gum that she liked. He was a wonderful lover. They were not in their thirties or even their forties anymore, but that didn’t matter because they had chemistry.
She had been dating Hank only three months, but it was fair to say she was in love. When he pulled into her driveway on the final day, she saw the tears gathering in the corners of his eyes and she nearly canceled her trip. She couldn’t leave him! She couldn’t walk away from the roses, the romance, the companionship. Here, on Tuckernuck, the days she spent with Hank seemed cruelly distant. The night at the Sherry-Netherland felt fictional, like something she’d read in one of her book club selections. She missed him. It was killing her.
Birdie’s phone calls to Hank were not altogether satisfactory. She had placed the first call on the Fourth of July. Hank had picked up the phone and said, quizzically, “Hello?”
Birdie had said, “Hank?”
Hank had said, “Birdie?”
Birdie said, “Yes! It’s me! I’m calling from Tuckernuck!”
Hank said, “How? Why?” She had explained to him that she would be incommunicado for thirty days. Not only was it against family rules to use a cell phone (Grant had broken this rule liberally; he spoke to the office four and five times in a day and would have done so using a ham radio), but it was nearly impossible to get reception.
She said, “There is one funny little place where I can get reception. You can hear me, right?”
“I can hear you fine,” Hank said. “But I thought it was against the rules.”
“Oh, it is,” Birdie said. “I had to sneak away.” This was true: she had waited until Chess fell asleep on the beach and Tate and India wandered off in search of oystercatchers, and then she’d slipped up the stairs to the bluff. Back at the house, she’d left a note on the table that said,
Went for a walk.
Which wasn’t a lie. Still, Birdie had felt a twinge of guilt and attendant panic that something would happen while she was gone. A rogue wave would come in and sweep Chess away.
