Two Rivers (5 page)

I
n the summer of 1958, my father set out to invent a machine that would automatically fold freshly laundered clothes. Most of his inventions were aimed at making my mother’s life easier. She was an accidental housewife, a college graduate and once-aspiring musician whose life took a turn for the ordinary, as many extraordinary women’s lives did, when she fell in love. My father’s efforts at easing the burden of laundering and dishwashing and floor scrubbing were like small apologies for something understood but unspoken between them.

My mother, Helen Wilder, met Charlie Montgomery at Middlebury College, where Charlie, my father, was studying engineering, and she, music. They married not long after they graduated and, despite more grandiose plans, moved to Two Rivers when my grandmother died, leaving them the house that my father had grown up in. Convinced that they might be able to save some money before moving on, my mother agreed to spend the first few years of their married life in Two Rivers. My father accepted a job at the Two Rivers Paper Company, and my mother taught piano. But when she became pregnant with me, she must have known that her tenure in Two Rivers would last more than a few years. And before she knew it, I figure, she had probably resigned herself to bake sales instead of classical performances—to the quotidian life of a New England housewife instead of the glamour of a concert pianist’s.

The truth was, though I adored my mother, I was also embarrassed by her. She wasn’t like anybody else’s mother. Not my best friend, Ray’s, not Betsy’s either. She was fluent in French (
Parisian
French, she emphasized, not the
bastardized
French of Two Rivers’s French Canadian population), and she had even been to France as a foreign exchange student while in college. She was constantly using French vocabulary when English, in her opinion, would not suffice. This, like much about my mother, was upsetting to the regular people in Two Rivers. First of all, she hadn’t taken my father’s name when she got married, convincing many people that they weren’t married at all but simply living in sin. She didn’t cook and she didn’t know how to sew. She wrote angry letters to the editor of the local paper and she refused to wear skirts. And, perhaps worst of all, instead of reading
Redbook
or
Ladies’ Home Journal
, she had the Rexall order one issue of
The New York Times
every week. This would have been fine, except that she insisted on picking it up each Sunday morning when everyone else was just getting out of church and stopping at the drugstore for their Sunday sundries. Thanks to
The New York Times
, everyone in Two Rivers knew that Helen Wilder did not believe in God.

Betsy’s mother, on the other hand, had learned everything she
knew
from magazines: glorious glossy magazines that were spread out in full-colored fans on every end table in the house. She made cupcakes that looked like witches at Halloween and robin’s nests at Easter. Mrs. Parker believed wholeheartedly in God and went to church every Sunday in dresses she made herself from crinkly patterns that smelled like dust. Later, Betsy would let me hold the fragile parchment only after I’d washed my hands.

The summer that we were twelve, I fell in love twice. First with Betsy Parker, and then with her mother.

For a whole week after I’d spoken to Betsy outside her father’s barbershop, I’d been trying to come up with an excuse to go see her again. I didn’t need a haircut, or else I would have just returned to the barbershop. My father considered himself a competent lay barber and methodically cut my hair on the last day of every month (outside so as to avoid getting any hair on the floors, which already generated near tumbleweed-sized dust balls). Finally, after much rumination, I concocted a story about needing to borrow sugar.

It was a typical Saturday; my mother was curled up on the overstuffed chair in our living room lost inside a book, and my father was in the basement working on his folding machine. It had to have been eighty degrees outside, but my parents were
inside
people. Especially in the summer. My mother abhorred the sun, and my father preferred his basement workshop to the outdoors. As soon as I was allowed to operate the lawn mower, I took it upon myself to tend to the overgrown and unruly chaos that was our yard, but then, when I was only twelve and not allowed to touch anything with a motor, I made my way through the shin-high grass to the sidewalk and across the street to the Parkers’ tidy plot.

When Mrs. Parker opened the door, she could have been Elizabeth Taylor. Her hair was jet black, even darker than Betsy’s, and she was wearing a slinky sort of dress, looking more like she was at a cocktail party than simply puttering around that giant house. My ears were hot.

“I live across the street,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.

Mrs. Parker looked at me, her eyes the stunned eyes of a doe.

“Do you have some sugar?” I asked, relieved to have remembered my excuse.

She smiled then. “Sure, honey. How much do you need?”

I had no idea how much sugar one might need if one truly needed sugar. I was also suddenly aware that I had no way of getting the sugar home. “This much?” I suggested, making a bowl with my hands, seemingly solving both the quantity and container problem.

“About a cup? Sure thing, come on in.”

The inside of Betsy Parker’s house was as tidy as the outside. Fresh flowers stood erect in thin glass vases, catching light from any number of the windows. The floors were completely covered in carpeting. I’d never seen, or felt, anything like it before.

I followed her down a long hallway to the kitchen, where she motioned for me to sit at the clean white dinette set. Mrs. Parker opened up a tin marked “Sugar” in fancy red script and pulled out a scoop. She poured the sugar into a teacup and handed it to me.

“Here you go, exactly one level cup. What’s your momma making?”

I hoped my ears weren’t as red as they felt.

“Doughnuts,” I answered, saying the first sweet thing that popped into my head.

Mrs. Parker’s forehead wrinkled a little, and I was pretty certain I’d been figured out. “Can you be a sweetheart and get the recipe from her? You can bring it over when you return the teacup.” Mrs. Parker smiled. “I can’t find a decent doughnut recipe anywhere.”

I nodded, and was backing down the hall, balancing the teacup by its delicate handle when I remembered why I had really come.

“Oh,” I said. “Is Betsy home?”

“Sure, honey. She’s in her room. Would you like me to go get her?”

I thought about it for a minute, even pictured Betsy Parker in her room, maybe lying on her stomach on her bed, thumbing through a magazine, but the idea of actually talking to her suddenly seemed ludicrous.

“Nah,” I said. “Just tell her I stopped by.”

Mrs. Parker raised one perfect black eyebrow and then winked at me. “Sure thing, sugar.”

The next time I went back, I pretended my mother was making beef stew. I pulled a dusty cookbook down off the highest shelf in our kitchen and scanned the list of ingredients.
Bouillon…
I couldn’t pronounce it.
An onion
. My mother didn’t even hear me go.

This time, Betsy answered the door, breathing hard as if she’d been running.

“Hi,” I said, my heart thumping in my chest so hard I was fairly certain you could see it pounding through my shirt.

She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the house. “Follow me,” she said, leading me down the long hallway to the kitchen and then out the back door. Her hand was soft. She had a Band-aid on her thumb. Outside, she took off across the shady backyard, climbing nimbly up a giant maple. Once perched in the crook of two large branches, she whispered,
“Come up.”

Though the maple was unfamiliar, I’d climbed my share of trees and quickly ascended up into the tree’s depths. To my dismay, Betsy seemed unimpressed by my tree-climbing skills; she was fixated on something in the distance.

The Parkers lived next door to Mr. Lowe, a widower with throat cancer and a reputation for losing his temper in public. He’d been seen screaming at waitresses and gas station attendants and store clerks all over town. Some people said the terrible sounds that came out of his throat were punishment for his temper. He’d even yelled at me once when I lost my baseball in his hedges. Through the trees, I could barely see the shadow of a figure moving in the yard below.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Shhh,” Betsy whispered, pushing the back of my neck down so that my head lowered and revealed a better view.

He was standing in the middle of his backyard in a sleeveless white undershirt, a pair of shorts held up by suspenders. When he bent over to pick up the hula hoop at his feet, Betsy let go of the tree branch and smacked me in the arm. Hard. Below us, Mr. Lowe held the hula hoop tightly around his waist before he set it spinning, released it, and let his hips do the work. Betsy covered her mouth to keep from laughing, and I smiled. He was diligent in this task. Ridiculous. When we finally couldn’t stand it anymore and Betsy started to giggle, the hula hoop dropped to the ground, and Mr. Lowe looked up. When he started to holler with that awful damaged voice of his and shake his fist at the sky, we scurried down the tree. By the time we got to the bottom, we were shaking with laughter.

“I saw him naked once,” Betsy said.

“Nu-
uh
,” I said.

“In one of those kiddy pools,” she said, nodding. “He was wacking off.”

“Shut up,” I said, punching her arm. She didn’t flinch.

“I know where there are some dirty magazines,” she said.

“Really?” I asked. Earlier that summer Ray had stolen a copy of
Modern Man
from his dad’s collection. He’d even let me tear out a page with Bettie Page and Tempest Storm, both nearly naked, which I’d studied like a treasure map. As I traced breasts and teensy panties with my finger, I imagined myself an explorer, the topography both treacherous and thrilling.

She nodded. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

Now I didn’t need another excuse to come back. I had a real, live invitation. And there was something pretty damn exciting about the prospect of looking at naked pictures with Betsy.

I went back. Between June and August, I must have followed Mrs. Parker down that softly carpeted hallway a hundred times. Mrs. Parker was always wearing something none of the other neighborhood mothers (certainly not my mother anyway) could have pulled off. There was always something bubbling on the stove top, and she always had a frosted glass of lemonade or a Cherry Coke to offer. Betsy and I would gorge ourselves on homemade German chocolate cake or Lorna Doones until our stomachs ached, and then we’d take off on one adventure or another, usually spying on someone in the neighborhood. Betsy taught me the scientific names for genitalia both male and female that summer. And once, she even showed me a picture of Mrs. Parker wearing what looked like a skimpy caveman’s outfit, a giant bone in her hand. “A famous photographer took this of her. Before she married Daddy,” she told me. “She was going to be a model.” I beamed. I figured now that Betsy Parker trusted me, it wouldn’t be long until she loved me too.

But about a week before school started again, I went to Betsy’s house and she said that she wasn’t allowed to have company and closed the door in my face. Stunned, I walked home and found my father unpacking a brand new Kenmore clothes dryer from a cardboard box. The folding machine hadn’t worked, and it seemed to me that my father’s reluctant concession was an admission of failure. But being the half-full kind of person I was, my own failure did not deter me. I went back to the Parkers’ house the next day. And the next. But each time, Betsy said simply that she wasn’t allowed to have guests and closed the door. By the end of the week, I began to worry. It was as if our friendship, like summer, had only been seasonal. As ephemeral and fleeting as Vermont sunshine.

At school, Betsy was careful to avoid me. She wasn’t unkind, but she did make sure to sit across the room from me in homeroom, and she only spoke to me when necessary. By November, I’d forced myself to accept her indifference. I started to hang out with Brooder and Ray again, chucking dirt clods at first graders and chewing tobacco behind the school. In a way, it was as if Betsy had only been a dream.

But just before Thanksgiving, when an early snowstorm brought our first snow day of the year, I felt optimistic. And I missed her. After going back to bed for another hour, I decided to give Betsy one more chance. I thought that the prospect of pristine snow, just wet enough to make snowballs, might bring her back to me.

What I noticed first was the loose board on the front steps. It surprised me. Then I saw that the paint on the porch was peeling, that the roses, blooms long gone, had not been tended to. The bushes were skeletal, snarled.

Mrs. Parker answered the door wearing her slip, and I felt myself blushing. She looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor now—in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(which Brooder and I had snuck into the theater to see). Her hair was messy, and she was barefoot. She stepped out onto the porch and looked past me down the street.

“Is Betsy home?” I asked.