The Summer Cottage (3 page)

Pammy watched the boys go and then sat down next to Helen. She looked down into the water, head in hands, bent elbows on crisscrossed legs. “You got one,” she said. “Pull it up.”

C
HAPTER
3

 

H
elen put the magazine aside when she heard her mother shift in her chair. Claire enjoyed sleeping in the car and in her bed, but recently she did not like to wake up in what she considered to be a strange place, which the other day meant the couch in her own living room, but mostly referred to chairs in medical building waiting areas. And while the cottage that had been the Thompson family summer retreat since before Helen was born was far from strange, it would be vaguely unfamiliar this first visit this year, Helen guessed, due to her mother’s exhaustion. Helen switched chairs to be next to her mother. As soon as Claire opened her eyes, blinking in the afternoon sun that filled the porch with the golden light she loved, Helen laid her hand upon her mother’s shoulder. Claire looked in the direction of her daughter, the medication she had taken to ease her pain that morning still working its way through her system. “Did you have a nice rest?” Helen asked, knowing the sound of her voice brought her mother back faster.

Claire nodded her head then, mentally grounded, placed her hand on top of her daughter’s. “What time is it?”

Helen looked at her watch. “About four.”

“Yes,” said Claire, sounding pleased with Helen’s answer.

“Would you like some tea?”

“I don’t think so.” Claire was now fully awake and looking past her daughter at the giant maple tree across the street. “I’d like to see the beach.”

“Good idea,” said Helen, rising from her chair. “Do you want to walk or shall I put you in your chair?”

“The chair, I think. I’m a bit unsteady on my feet.”

Helen grabbed the walker that was resting against the wall and positioned it in front of her mother’s wicker chair. Claire grabbed on to the handles and slowly lifted herself until she was vertical. Helen, who had her right arm behind her mother’s back to stop her from falling, knew better than to touch her. There was so little Claire could do herself. It was a daily discussion: how much she used to be able to do just a few short years ago compared with how little she could do now. And then there were the days that Claire wanted to talk about how strong she had been as a young woman—a couple times a week, it seemed to surface. Helen, who could have told her mother’s story probably better than her mother could at this point, routinely listened attentively. Being her caregiver was more tolerable when Claire was in a good mood and chatted joyfully about her accomplishments. It was less so when she was achy and morose. On those days, she was tough on herself. Helen could do little to appease her at these times, Claire’s agitation ending only with sleep.

“Let’s head to the back door, for your chair, and then we’ll go to the beach.” Helen walked several steps behind her mother as Claire rolled and pushed her way toward the kitchen; Helen resisted the urge to walk in front, to set a pace her mother could not match. Once they reached the kitchen, it took Helen and Claire a few minutes to transfer from one transportation device inside the house to the other that Helen had placed just outside the back door. Claire sat down heavily. “There,” said Helen, to ward off any complaints. “We’re all set.”

“You’re all set,” said Claire, looking up at her daughter. “I haven’t been all damn set for three damn years.”

“Mom,” said Helen.

It had been three years and two months since Claire’s diagnosis: Her breast cancer had returned. She’d had a lumpectomy and radiation therapy in 1992 and had been diligent about her follow-up visits, always complying with the requests of her medical team, a word that she found ludicrous in this usage, and the wishes of her husband John, a pediatrician, even though she felt fine. And for eight years she had been fine—until the morning she noticed some bruising on her left breast. And when she inspected it with her fingers, she felt the mass under the skin. A month later, both breasts were gone. Two months after that, bald from chemotherapy and weak from the cancer’s progression, she knew she would not recover. Those burdened with the unhappy diagnosis of secondary angiosarcoma had less than a one in five chance of survival. As a swimmer, she’d once considered twenty percent as fairly good odds in the pool. As a sick old woman, she knew better. “What day is it, Helen? Tuesday?”

“Exactly.”

“And when is everyone coming?” They were rumbling along the grassy right-of-way now toward the beach. Claire’s chair was what she jokingly called an all-terrain vehicle, with large nubby tires that traversed uneven ground almost as easily though certainly less steadily than flat pavement.

“They’re coming in stages, Mom,” said Helen, trying to be patient with this the fourth or fifth run-through of the weekend itinerary. “Pammy will be here tomorrow, and Charlotte is scheduled to arrive on Thursday afternoon. Thomas, if he does come, will be here on Saturday.”

“We don’t know if he’s coming? I thought you said he was coming, Helen.”

“You know Thomas, Mom. He never commits.”

“He’ll be here,” said Claire as Helen stopped the chair several feet from the top of the seawall and set the brakes. “I do, indeed, know Thomas. He’ll be here.”

Helen nodded. “Do you want to stand?”

“Yes,” said Claire. Helen held out her arm, and Claire held on to it as she lifted herself out of the chair. The cancer, which had spread from her breasts into her lungs and then into her bones, made breathing and moving, simply existing, an effort. Her legs, once strong enough to kick her body through the water to the raft in just over a minute, ignored her pleas for support, hanging from her fragile hip bones, as ineffectual as wind chimes on a still day. Helen and Claire both gazed out at the horizon.

“Top ten, I think,” said Helen.

“I think so too.”

“And it’s only the end of June.”

Claire smiled at her daughter. “Good old reliable Helen.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know damn well what I mean,” said Claire. “Let’s sit on this top step a moment, so I can concentrate on breathing in this salty air. It’s good for what ails me.”

“So you keep telling me, Mom,” said Helen, helping her mother sit and then encircling her shrunken waist with her arm.

They sat for several minutes, neither woman speaking, until Claire said, “It’s times like this that I miss him the most.”

“Me too.”

“He was a good man, your father, a strong man.”

“Yes.”

“I keep wondering if I should have kept him home that night.”

It was an evening they talked about more often than Helen cared to—a recurring, never-ending conversation, like those about Claire’s swimming days and her cancer. When the phone rang at two in the morning the night their “city” home neighbor Joellen’s daughter, Bethany, went into labor, it had been raining hard for several hours.
You can’t go out in this,
Claire said at the time, mindful that her husband had been battling a bad cold for a week. But they had discussed the imminent birth, John and Claire, and agreed that he would go to the hospital, even though he had recently retired, instead of leaving Bethany in the capable hands of his young, taciturn partner. Normally, neither John nor his partner needed to be present in the hospital’s birthing room, but Bethany was expecting triplets, the product of fertility drugs she had been taking for two years that had finally resulted in pregnancy.
He won’t talk to her the way you would,
Joellen had said to John about his partner the day she knocked on the back door with a loaf of warm banana bread and the request that he preside over the birth of her grandchildren. So, John put on his galoshes that night, his heavy raincoat and hat, and drove to the hospital and helped with the delivery of the three small but healthy children, two girls and a boy. And he was just about home when a traveling salesman, drinking the last of six beers that had been sitting on the seat next to him, drove his rental car through a red light and into the driver’s side of John’s Jeep, killing him instantly.

“He wanted to deliver Bethany’s babies,” said Helen. “There’s nothing you could have done.” The tears that rimmed her eyes each time she had this conversation with her mother reappeared. She dabbed at them with the sleeve of her T-shirt.

Claire took hold of the railing at the side of the steps and slowly stood. “I think about it every time I see those children—although they are darling,” she said. “After that night, I never again cared for banana bread.”

 

Back at the house, Helen again settled her mother into the wicker chair on the porch. “How about that tea now?”

“Yes. I’d love some.”

Helen busied herself in the kitchen while the water in the kettle boiled. She washed the lettuce for the dinner salad, set the dining room table for two, and peeled the summer squash, her mother’s favorite vegetable. When the kettle whistled, Helen poured the hot water into two mugs that held Constant Comment tea bags and dunked the bags several times. She put the mugs on a tray, along with a salad plate of chocolate chip cookies she had made the night before, and walked back out to the porch. Wanting to change topics, to lighten her mother’s dark mood, Helen kissed Claire on the forehead. “Well, what’s that for?”

“Nothing,” said Helen. “It just feels good to be back, doesn’t it?”

“Very good,” said Claire, taking the bait. “I love it here.”

“We all do.”

When the phone rang, fracturing the easy silence that had fallen between them, Helen started, spilling tea in her lap. “Rats!” she said, setting the mug down on the cork coaster on the table next to her before walking to the corner of the living room, where the white Princess phone that hung on the wall continued to ring loudly.

It was her husband, Charles, calling from the campground pay phone in the Adirondacks. He and their sons, Todd and Ned, were having a successful fishing trip, and he wanted to know if they could stay another couple days. And, even though he had been hesitant when the boys suggested he leave his cell phone in the locked glove compartment of the car, Charles had not missed the stream of phone calls from his insurance agency. He told his seven employees before he left that this was a real vacation, and that if they had an emergency, they could call his wife who would be able to find him. He had never done that before, and didn’t know if he would ever do it again. But he was grateful for the quiet, for the uninterrupted time with his boys. “The boys are getting along so well.”

“They always do.”

“You know that’s not true, and you know what I mean,” said Charles. “Maybe there really
is
something to your fresh-air theory.” Helen laughed. “How is everything going there?”

“Fine,” said Helen, wishing as she had since her teenage years that there was another phone in the house, one she could talk on without everyone within earshot listening in. It was Claire who insisted that the phone be installed in a central location.
It’s easier to get to,
she had said, also noting that no one in their family needed to keep secrets. They had not had a phone in the house at all until 1970, when John finally convinced his wife, after a fire in the Heights destroyed three cottages, that emergencies really did happen.

“Have you heard from Thomas?”

“No.”

“He’ll come, Helen. He’s almost as competitive as your mother. There’s no way he’ll leave the house and the rest of her estate to the three of you—even if he doesn’t need the money.”

“I agree.”

“Is Pammy still coming tomorrow, and Charlotte on Thursday? How about the boys and I show up on Friday, so you girls can have some fun together before our arrival?”

Helen smiled at the phone. “Okay. But you will owe me.”

“That I can handle,” said Charles. “Add it to my tab.”

“Bring us some fish.”

“You can count on it,” he said. “And Helen? You’re a good egg.”

“Yeah,” she said. “So I’ve heard. Give the boys my love.”

“They send theirs, honey.”

“We’ll see you Friday then?”

“Yes. And I’m serious about that fish.”

“You better be.”

“Love you,” he said.

“I know you do,” said Helen, uncomfortable still to confess her love for Charles in front of her mother.

“Say it,” he said, kidding her.

“It,” said Helen, hanging up the phone.

“Delayed?” her mother asked, unable to keep up with the gist of the conversation.

“By choice.” Helen returned to her seat and picked up her mug. “The fish are biting, and they can’t bear to leave.”

“That’s too bad,” said Claire, the corners of her droopy mouth sinking lower.

“I think it’s great. Now we can have a slumber party. No boys allowed.”

C
HAPTER
4

 

A
nother session of prolific crabbing behind her, Helen returned her bucket and line to the dirt-floor garage and ran into the cottage to change into her suit. “Hi, parents!” she called on her way up the stairs, as Thomas did when he walked into the house at dinnertime. Claire and John were sitting on the porch, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, her mother
The New York Times
and her father
The Wall Street Journal
. They both lifted their hands in greeting, but knew better than to attempt conversation with Helen, who was very busy in the morning. Dressed in the floral Speedo her mother had selected for her at Bell’s Department Store, she bolted out the door and sprinted to the clothesline. She pulled at her saltwater-stiff beach towel, sending the wood clothespins fastened to its corners flying into the air and onto the damp grass. She then flew across the street and leaped off the seawall onto the sand. Just past nine o’clock, the beach was still deserted, save for the group of young swimmers struggling to backstroke out to the raft. “Keep your heads down!” yelled their instructor, Art, who had taught classes at the beach the last three summers. “You’ve got to relax. Kick, now, and pull with those arms!”

The flailing, sputtering children, half-submerged at any point in time, slowly wiggled their bodies toward the raft. When Art stopped talking and resumed swimming, some of the stragglers flipped over onto their stomachs and swam freestyle for a few yards in an effort to catch up with the others. No longer a participant in swim classes, Helen was happy to watch from the beach. She had been in Art’s class the previous summer, and had graduated, he said, with flying colors. Helen’s mother had thrown her into the ocean when she was two, and she had been comfortable in the water since. Her mother told her she wanted Helen to be confident and able if she fell off a boat in deep water, but Helen knew her mother really wanted her to follow in her aquatic footsteps, or, at the very least, to be “the best she could be,” Claire’s goal for all her children. Helen overheard her mother one day proudly telling her father that Helen could swim circles around most of the kids on the beach.

Helen spread her towel on the sand and lay upon it, letting the sun warm her back and legs. Minutes later, she flipped. Restless and uninterested in sunbathing, Helen got up off her towel and walked down to the water. She walked in up to the middle of her calves, then stopped. It was still a little early for a swim. She waded out onto the hard, damp sand closest to the water and began walking at a slow pace down the beach, with her head down and her eyes focused on the tiny, iridescent stones that lined the shore. Amongst them, the carefully trained beachcomber could find sea glass, the coveted treasure Helen and Pammy collected with a passion.

“Did you find any yet?” It was Pammy, yelling from the top of the cement stairs that led down to the beach.

“Tons!” Helen yelled back.

Pammy skittered down the stairs and jogged the beach to catch up to her sister. “You’re a liar, Helen Thompson,” said Pammy, stopping next to Helen, breathing hard. “Let me see.”

Helen held out her closed fist, turned it over, and opened her fingers. There, in her damp palm were three beer-bottle brown pieces of sea glass, the most plebian variety. “You believed me for a second though, didn’t you?”

“Not really. Where did you start?”

“Johansons’ steps.” Helen was again slowly walking, her gaze downward, searching.

“I call the other direction—Johansons’ steps to Tetreaus’ steps,” Pammy said, arms across her training bra.

“You better start now then,” said Helen, “because I’m heading there next.”

“But I just called it, Helen.”

“Yeah, but you won’t do any serious searching today. You know who just came down to the beach.”

Pammy glanced back over her shoulder and saw Michael sitting on the bottom step of the cement stairs that led from his waterside cottage to the beach. “Who cares?” Pammy shrugged one shoulder. “He was snotty to me at the docks yesterday. Charlotte told me to ignore him.”

“I’ll bet you my ice cream truck money that you can’t do that.”

Pammy hesitated. “What do I have to do to get your quarter?”

“Not talk to him when we pass by.”

Pammy bit her lower lip. “Done,” she said, holding out her hand for Helen to shake. Their brother Thomas told them that a handshake was the only universally accepted deal sealer.

“Let’s go then,” said Helen, now walking in the opposite direction. Pammy fell into step beside her, eyes locked to the ground. The only way she was going to win this bet was to avoid eye contact with Michael. If she looked at him, if her brown eyes met his green eyes, she was toast.

“Rats,” said Helen. Pammy looked up. “He’s going up.” Together they watched Michael’s tanned torso ascend the steps, cross over the short stretch of grass in front of the house, and disappear into their screened-in porch. Pammy grinned.

“I think I’m going to have a Chocolate Éclair after lunch and a Strawberry Shortcake after dinner.”

Helen stopped and pouted. She had made her bed that morning, and last night set the table and dried all the family dinner dishes for that quarter. Her father had carefully extracted it from his pocket after the last pot was put away in the dish pantry and handed it to her with ceremony, commending her effort.
Nice work, Helen,
he had said, adding that her ice cream the following day would taste better because she’d earned it. “That’s not fair,” she said. “He isn’t even here to ignore.”

“The bet was to not talk to him when we passed by. You said nothing about his presence.”

“It’s still not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” said Pammy, repeating something their mother often told them. “Get used to it.” Helen resumed walking. “Look,” said Pammy, knowing what it felt like to lose a quarter because Charlotte routinely tricked Pammy out of hers. Charlotte didn’t even need the money, since she had a job or a boyfriend who would pay her way. She did it for sport. “Mom asked me to organize the garage today. I’ll let you do it, and you can earn another quarter.”

Helen smiled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, thanks, Pammy.”

Together they walked down the beach, quietly searching for more glass that had been shaped and smoothed by the sea. Even though Pammy was three years older than Helen, she rarely made Helen feel like a kid, and hardly ever told her to get lost. Their older sister Charlotte had little time for either of them. Seventeen and consumed with boys, she slept late, often until noon, enervated from the previous night’s party or marathon kissing session on the beach. When she finally arose, she simply could not speak to anyone until she’d had a cigarette and a Coke. Knowing the delicacy of her older sister’s stomach, Helen, who was often making herself lunch when Charlotte first walked into the kitchen, would offer her older sister a bite of her sandwich, which was either egg or tuna salad, whatever Claire had prepared and stored in the fridge. Charlotte, inured to her sister’s antics, would merely sneer and brush Helen off with a flick of her hand, as if coaxing a fruit fly to move on.

“Look,” said Pammy, bending down to pick up a flat, royal blue piece. “I haven’t seen this color in years.” She held it up for Helen’s inspection.

“Noxzema jar,” said Helen, with authority.

“What?”

“That’s what I call that color. Noxzema jar.”

“You mean that blue jar of white stuff Charlotte washes her face with?”

“Exactly.”

“I think you’re right, Helen,” said Pammy, holding the glass up to the sun. “In fact, I think there’s a little bit of Noxzema still on here.”

“Where?” said Helen, moving closer to Pammy.

“Made you look,” said Pammy, triumphant.

Helen hesitated for a moment, then tagged her sister. “You’re it!” she said, suddenly breaking into a run. Pammy pursued her, but couldn’t catch Helen, who was not only faster, but also a master at running through sand. Fifty yards down the beach, Helen slowed to a jog and then collapsed at Shallow End. There, a sandbar stretched from the shore to Pearson’s private dock, where the land suddenly dropped off twenty feet, enabling Old Man Pearson to sail his boat almost to his doorstep. A privilege, Helen was told, that was enormously important to him. Helen was only interested in Shallow End at low tide, when she could walk out into the water for what felt like a half mile and not wet the bottom of her bathing suit.

Within a minute, Pammy reached her sister and sat down next to her in the sand. For another minute, they both were silent, Pammy breathing hard still. Then she said, “Do you really think this piece came from a Noxzema jar?” Pammy held the blue glass to the sun for further analysis.

“No,” said Helen. “Nobody but Charlotte uses that stuff. That huge, gross jar has been sitting on her bureau since last summer.”

“What else is this color?”

“I don’t know, Pammy. It’s probably some kind of industrial glass?”

“Industrial glass?” asked Pammy, smiling.

“Glass used in industry,” said Helen, pedantically.

“You are a dope.” Pammy stood and brushed the sand off her legs.

“And you,” said Helen, standing, setting her sea glass down in a neat pile on the sand and casually walking toward the water, “have bird poop all over the back of your shorts.” Pammy craned her neck over her shoulder and looked down at the seat of her shorts, which was just as pink as when she put them on. “Made you look!” Helen shouted, as she took off into the water. She ran as fast as she could, not slowing until the water, now thigh-deep, pulled at her legs, forcing an end to her sprint. She leaped up one last time then dove under the surface, allowing the water to swallow her whole. The sand scraped against her stomach as she swam along the bottom. When she surfaced, she turned toward shore and saw Pammy, arms akimbo. “Come on!” Helen shouted. “It’s not cold!”

“I can’t. I don’t have my suit on under my poop-stained shorts!”

“Are you naked under those short?” Helen shouted.

“You,” Pammy said, laughing, “are disgusting.”

“Yes,” Helen said. “I can tell you’re disgusted.”

Helen waded back to the shore, and then the two Thompson girls started a slow walk back to their section of the beach. The Thompson family didn’t own that section—no one owned the beach—but it was where they always sat, on their beach towels, in their sand chairs, under their umbrellas. Everyone had a regular spot. The cottagers that lived atop the seawall simply strolled down the steps in front of their houses and planted themselves. Those who lived across the street or down the road from the beach accessed the beach by the set of stairs closest to their houses and then camped out within fifty yards of the bottom step. Everyone knew where everyone else sat, and no one encroached on anyone else’s unofficial turf. Summer after summer, this was the case. The only aberration occurred with renters.

They didn’t show up very often, the renters, because most people in Helen’s Little Crescent Beach neighborhood spent the summer at the shore. They packed up their shorts, T-shirts, and sandals; their bathing suits, towels, and suntan lotion; their perishable food items, and drove their station wagons out of their “city” home driveways on the last day of school and stayed at the beach until Labor Day. Every once in a while, one of the families Helen had known for as long as she could remember took a vacation elsewhere for part of the summer, or their teenagers had jobs or love interests in their hometowns. When this happened, their cottages typically sat vacant, waiting for their return. But occasionally, the cottages were rented or simply given to friends, neighbors, and coworkers. And the newcomers didn’t know any of the rules. They carted their inflatable tubes and Styrofoam surfboards to the beach in wagons, their children often riding two-wheelers behind them. And they parked themselves on the sand wherever they found a free section of beach.

The first time Helen encountered a renter, she was taken aback and unsure how to proceed. One of the renter kids had his towel in the exact spot she usually laid her towel. Looking for advice, Helen had run back to the cottage to her parents, who were drinking coffee and reading their newspapers on the porch. “Someone’s in our spot,” she said.

John looked up first. “Pardon me, Helen?”

“On the beach,” Helen said. “Someone is sitting in our spot.”

Claire then raised her head and looked at her daughter. “Well, who is it? It is the Callahan cousins? Sometimes when they are visiting they sit wherever they darn well please.”

“No one owns the beach, Helen,” said John, looking at Claire over his bifocals.

“I don’t know who it is,” said Helen. “I think it might be renters.”

Claire wrinkled her nose. “Tell them to move over.”

“You may
not
tell them to move over,” said John, gently but firmly as was his manner.

“Put your towel six inches from theirs then,” said Claire. “That should send them a message.”

“What kind of message are you looking to send, Claire?” John asked his wife. Claire looked back down at the newspaper in her hands. “Find another spot, Helen. There is plenty of room down there, so I know you won’t have any trouble securing a portion of sand for your towel and the required ounces of saltwater for your body in which to swim.”

Helen crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t like it.”

“Who does?” asked Claire from behind the sports section.

“It’s just for one day,” said John.

“That’s right,” said Claire, laying the paper down on her outstretched legs. “Tomorrow morning, you’re going to beat them to the beach and lay out your towel wherever you please.”

Helen looked at her dad. “Can I do that?”

“You can lay your towel anywhere you wish, just like they can lay their towels anywhere they wish.”